WASHINGTON – Joe Biden’s presidential campaign is in trouble. That may sound crazy. The former vice president just opened up (according to one poll) a 32-point lead over the rest of the Democratic field. But beneath the surface, trouble is brewing.
Biden will be 78 on Inauguration Day 2021. That would make him older, if elected, on the day he takes office than President Ronald Reagan was on the day he left office.
With old age comes old baggage – in Biden’s case, his handling of Anita Hill’s testimony during Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. Polls show that 30% of Democrats don’t approve of Biden’s handling of Hill’s testimony; 44% said they didn’t know or had no opinion. That’s not surprising. The Thomas hearings took place in 1991, when the Soviet Union still existed, the last apartheid president of South Africa was still in office and something called the World Wide Web was made available to the public. Tens of millions of American voters have been born since 1991, and have no living memories of these events.
But Biden’s Democratic rivals are going to make sure they do know about Anita Hill. The more Biden’s primary lead expands, the more desperate his Democratic opponents will be to bring him down. And Hill is their most powerful weapon.
Biden knows this, which is why he recently tried to reach out to Hill and smooth things over. It didn’t work. Hill told The New York Times that “she was not convinced that he has taken full responsibility for his conduct at the hearings – or for the harm he caused other victims of sexual harassment and gender violence.” She said “she was troubled by the recent accounts of women who say Mr. Biden touched them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable.” And she said that Biden’s handling of her testimony “set the stage” for the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.