Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, flailing in the polls and finding that being a white feminist isn’t enough to campaign on in today’s Democratic primaries, took shots Wednesday night at Joe Biden. Absent legitimate criticism, the New York senator referenced an op-ed Biden wrote in 1981. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she got its contents all wrong.

After one moderator of Wednesday's Democratic debates asked Gillibrand about closing the ( basically nonexistent) gender pay gap, Gillibrand took the opportunity to present her fake opposition research.



"I don't know what's happened except that, now, you're running for President."@JoeBiden shrugs off @SenGillibrand's attacks focusing on women in the workforce. pic.twitter.com/O52yxjc3kI — Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) August 1, 2019



“I think we have to have a broader conversation about whether we value women and whether we want to make sure women have every opportunity in the workplace,” she said, adding:



And I want to address Vice President Biden directly. When the Senate was debating middle-class affordability for childcare, he wrote an op-ed. He voted against it, the only vote, but what he wrote in an op-ed was that he believed that women working outside the home would, quote, ‘create the deterioration of family.’ He also said that women who were working outside the home were, quote, ‘avoiding responsibility.’



The op-ed, however, says no such thing. Published almost 40 years ago when Biden was a senator from Delaware, the article argued that the child care tax credit should not expand to include wealthier families. If the family could afford it, one parent should stay at home.

“I do not care whether in a modern marriage you want the man or the woman to take that responsibility,” he said at the time, according to HuffPost.

His actual quote about the “deterioration” of families read: “A recent act of Congress puts the federal government in the position, through the tax codes, of subsidizing the deterioration of the family. That is tragic.”

Tragic, not because the woman wouldn’t be at home, but because no one would be. Biden cast the only “no” vote against expanding the child care tax credit, and this wasn’t the only departure from Democratic orthodoxy that has come back to haunt him.

But what he didn’t do was argue that women should get back to the kitchen, and it’s evidence of Gillibrand’s desperation to rise in the polls that she would charge him with saying so. Biden, however, didn’t have to wait for the fact-checkers to get to work before he clapped back.

“That was a long time ago, and here’s what it was about. It would have given people making today $100,000 a year a tax break for childcare. I did not want that. I wanted the childcare to go to people making less than $100,000,” he said. “As a single father who in fact raised three children for five years by myself, I have some idea what it cost.”

Biden added that he has a record of supporting feminist policies — and finding a supporter in Gillibrand.

“I came up with the It's On Us proposal to see to it that women were treated more decently on college campuses,” he said to Gillibrand. “You came to Syracuse University with me and said it was wonderful. I'm passionate about the concern making sure women are treated equally. I don't know what's happened except that you're now running for president.”