One person, who has supported a political competitor to Biden, acknowledges that she is speaking because Biden is considering entering the primaries; the other says that if Biden really respects women, he should not run and clear the field for the capable women candidates.

Wait a minute: Is this what gender equality really means? Is this the kind of society we want to live in — where right-wingers can do any vicious thing they want to anyone and shrug it off, while people on the center-left are supposed to expel from public life anyone who says a single wrong word or has done something benignly intended in the past that now does not fit changed norms?

Not me, that is not the kind of America I want to live in. That is not the kind of Democratic primary I want to participate in. If Biden wants to run, I want to hear what he has to say and compare him, fair and square, to the others.

Biden has long been known as an emotional person who hugs just about everyone he feels positively about, male and female. Now the social mores have shifted. He needs to say he realizes this and change his behavior accordingly. Everyone else, meanwhile, needs to get a grip.

Anyone who experiences an unwanted word or gesture should tell the person involved that they would like them not to say/do that — not wait a decade and contact the media in an expedient moment. And Democrats must keep in mind that they need votes in 2020 from millions of older Americans who are really put off by this kind of out-of-context piling on.

[End of Skocpol’s email.]

For more …

“Joe Biden needs to cut it out. And so does the mob that is after him,” Karen Tumulty writes in The Washington Post.

My colleague Michelle Goldberg says that this is the wrong time for Biden to run and criticizes his reaction to this controversy: In response to Lucy Flores’s description of his touching, “Biden could have told her that he was sorry for making her uneasy. Instead, he focused on his intentions rather than her experience, a faint echo of the way he’d ignored [Anita] Hill’s experience decades ago.”