Even before anyone ever heard of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Democrats were facing a marketing challenge unknown in the era of moving images: selling a candidate that no one -- with the possible exception of Jill “Edith Wilson” Biden -- could possibly be enthused about.

By any standard, especially by progressive Democratic standards, Joe Biden is a flaming mess. No Democrat of any age will have ever pulled the lever for a less attractive candidate. Compared to Joe, Hillary Clinton was JFK. Hillary actually had fans.

Democratic leaders and their increasingly Pravda-like media allies know what a mess Biden is. In 2019, before he emerged as the candidate, they openly shared their misgivings. In early June 2019, for instance, both the New York Times and the Washington Post produced video hit pieces highlighting Biden’s problematic history. These pieces were triggered, wrote the Post, by the fact that the Biden campaign “lifted language without credit, at times word for word, when crafting its education and climate plans.”

The Post video dealt largely with Biden’s plagiarism issues dating back to his first presidential run in 1987. Although the tone of the narration is not as harsh as it should be, the revelations are damning. Biden’s plagiarism comes across like a cry for help. It is hard to decide which was more pathetic: lifting the speeches and hardscrabble life details of Welsh Labour Party’s Neil Kinnock or swiping virtually word-for-word JFK’s memorable 1961 inaugural address.

A follow-up Post article, also from June 2019, noted that Biden’s credibility problems did not end in 1987 with his withdrawal from the presidential race. In 2007, running for president once again, Biden claimed he had been “shot at” in Iraq’s Green Zone. He had not, but this was not the only time he lied about Iraq.

In 2002 Biden voted to authorize the use of force, but when the left turned against the war, so did Biden, if a little slowly. "The world, in fact, voted to send inspectors in and [Bush] still went to war," Biden said of his 2002 vote. "From that point on, I was in the position of making the case that it was a big, big mistake." As CNN pointed out, Biden was defending his vote as late as 2006, aggressively so until 2004.

The video produced by the New York Times, although equally soft in tone, exposed several issues other than plagiarism that make the Biden candidacy hard for progressives, especially women and African Americans, to swallow. On multiple occasions, for instance, Biden claimed to have marched in the civil rights movement. Said the narrator, “He never marched in the civil rights movement at all.”

In March 2019, New York magazine pulled no punches in an article headlined, “Will Black Voters Still Love Biden When They Remember Who He Was?” Its lead paragraphs sums up a few of the reasons Democratic voters, especially blacks, would find it hard to cozy up to Biden come November:

Joe Biden once called state-mandated school integration “the most racist concept you can come up with,” and Barack Obama “the first sort of mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.” He was a staunch opponent of “forced busing” in the 1970s, and leading crusader for mass incarceration throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. Uncle Joe has described African-American felons as “predators” too sociopathic to rehabilitate -- and white supremacist senators as his friends.

Knowing his history, Biden’s vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris, famously scorched him during a primary debate for opposing busing. Harris also raised the accusation anew that on at least two occasions Biden praised segregationists. As recently as 2013, in fact, Biden eulogized, at tedious length, the “great” Sen. Robert Byrd. “He always spoke truth to power,” said Biden, including, one presumes, during Byrd’s tenure as exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan.

Troubling for the left, too, as the Times video suggests, was Biden’s treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings in 1991. In Hill’s biography, Speaking Truth to Power, she claimed that Biden, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, forced her to go into details that “disgusted” her. She added, "The senators’ tendency toward ad hoc rulemaking weighed in heavily against fairness.” The Times video notes that Biden’s role in this hearing still “haunts” him.

The Times narrator concedes that Biden “has struggled to project himself as a man in step with his times.” One such struggle concerns what the narrator daintily calls Biden’s “relationship with personal space.” Although most Democrats don’t know the depth of it, that “relationship” is as pathological as his plagiarism. As this eight-minute video shows, Biden’s public fondling of little girls goes well beyond “creepy” into the realm of the perverse. Were he a priest he would be in prison.

Biden’s boundary problems did not end with little girls. Nor did they end with rubbing and groping. Among the many adult women he has been accused of molesting is Tara Reade, a 28-year-old Senate aide at the time of her fateful encounter in March 1993. In this “60 Minutes Australia” interview Reade goes into detail about the alleged assault, claiming Biden forced her legs apart with his knee, whispered “I want to f--- you,” and penetrated her with his finger. When Reade resisted, Biden spat out, “You know, you’re nothing to me, nothing.”

Unlike its American counterpart, “60 Minutes Australia” dared to address the issue of media bias. Interviewer Alexis Daish acknowledged that Reade, unlike a Trump accuser, “faced a barrage of scrutiny.” A lifelong Democrat, Reade agreed: “The fact that he was an elite Democrat put him in an untouchable position.” As a result, said Reade, “I lost everything -- work, legitimacy, reputation, friendships, housing -- everything.”

When questioned by Daish about why Trump supporters give him a pass on accusations of sexual impropriety, former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci made a valid point, namely that, unlike Biden and other career politicians, Trump “has not led his life with great sanctimony.”

Biden has. As late as 2017 Biden received a humanitarian award in New York for his efforts to protect victims of sexual violence. At the climax of his acceptance speech, Biden thundered, “No means no. Period. No matter when it’s said. No matter how it’s said.” The audience applauded.

Scaramucci might have said too that it was not Trump supporters who made heroines out of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford. Nor did they launch the #MeToo movement, yesterday’s cause du jour.

For all his talk that “women are to be believed,” Biden asked America not to believe Reade. “The truth is,” he said, “these claims are flat out false.” When asked about whether Biden was lying, Reade backhandedly gave him the benefit of the doubt: “I don’t know what his capacity is now.” Reade knows that Biden’s “capacity” is seriously diminished. Too many voters, however, do not know just how diminished Biden is, and the media are working hard to keep it that way.

At this stage, no one would expect progressives to care a whit about Biden’s increasing senility or his arranging corrupt foreign deals for his relatives, let alone his role in ObamaGate. One would expect them, however, to care at least a little about the things they have marched about and screamed about and even rioted about. They don’t.

Daish asked a good friend of Reade’s, one who has known about the assault for twenty-five years, what she would think when she casts her vote for Biden. Said the women, “He is going to be the president who assaulted my very good friend.”

For all their talk about empowering women and minorities, leftists have used all their vast media, tech, and deep state power to sell America a corrupt old white guy of diminished mental capacity. To do this they have had to suppress the fact that -- by any standards -- Biden is a pedophile, a plagiarist, a liar, and a hypocrite, and -- by the left’s standards -- a racist, sexist, and warmonger as well as a credibly accused sexual predator.

Democrats better hope postal workers don’t go on strike.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is widely available. See also www.cashill.com.

Image: Digital Campaign Manager Doug Jones for Senate