“I opposed Clarence Thomas from the beginning,” he said. (He voted against him in the committee count, and in the final tally, too, but he also called him heading into the hearing “a man of high character.”)
“I believed Anita Hill from the beginning,” Biden continued in Charleston. (“It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, she was lying,” he said, at least according to Arlen Specter, the late, then-Republican senator from Pennsylvania.) “And I tried to control the questions under the laws that exist for the Senate,” he said. “And I was unable to do it. Just like the last hearing, the last hearing they had, they were unable to control—keep people from being able to ask questions.”
Biden shifted into what he did thereafter.
“What I did was I made a commitment. I made a commitment,” Biden told Wofford. “Never again would the Judiciary Committee only have men on that committee. So I went out and campaigned for two people—Carol Moseley Braun, an African-American senator from the state of Illinois, and Dianne Feinstein from California—on the condition that if they won they would join the committee, they would become part of the committee. I kept that commitment.” (“I have no recollection of that,” Moseley Braun told me when I asked if Biden campaigned for her. “I don’t remember him doing that,” said Jeannie Morris, a reporter who embedded with Moseley Braun’s campaign in ’92 and eventually wrote a book about it. “I doubt in ’92 if she really wanted him to come campaign,” said Cobble, her political director and fundraising coordinator. “Women especially were not very happy with Biden.” But he did, along with a fistful of other senators, on a live, closed-circuit feed, beam into an early October fundraiser Moseley Braun had at the Chicago Hilton.)
In Charleston, people applauded. “Number three,” Biden continued with his answer to Wofford. “I’ve spoken with Anita Hill. And I apologized for not being able to protect her more.” (Hill in recent years has said repeatedly it was not a sufficient apology.) “But, look, I wish I could have protected her more. I publicly apologized, apologized then. And I was able to—what she—we owe her—we owe Anita Hill a lot, because what she did by coming forward, she gave me the ability to pass the—right and pass the Violence Against Women Act. We owe her a great deal of credit.”
What, I asked Wofford, had she thought of the answer?
“Good enough,” she told me, for her to vote for him in February—although she copped to being “a little queasy when I did it”—and she’ll without doubt vote for him come November. “I would have loved 100 percent personal responsibility, but I was about 80 percent satisfied,” she said. It was important for her to hear about the Moseley Braun and Feinstein and the Judiciary Committee. “We in political science call that symbolic representation—the importance of not having all men—and I’m 100 percent on board with that—and that’s obviously an issue now with all the talk about the VP pick.”
Source: politico.com
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