Jill Biden Addresses Husband’s Treatment of Anita Hill: ‘Time to Move On’
Jill Biden, the wife of former Vice President and current Democratic presidential favorite Joe Biden, aimed to pour cold water on her husband’s past involvement with Anita Hill and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings from nearly 30 years ago — but instead may have poured gasoline on the smoldering embers of that story.
Ms. Biden sat down for an interview with NPR’s Rachel Martin, and told the radio host that despite the recent attention brought about her husband’s official run for the nation’s highest office, it’s time for people to “move on.”
A transcript of that interview provided by NPR reveals details of the interview:
Biden: I watched the hearings like most other Americans, and so I mean Joe said, as I did, we believed Anita Hill. He voted against Clarence Thomas. And as he has said, I mean he’s called Anita Hill, they’ve talked, they’ve spoken, and he said, you know, he feels badly. He apologized for the way the hearings were run. And so now it’s kind of — it’s time to move on.
Martin: Why did he wait until [just before] he was running for president to call her?
Biden: Well, I guess it was just not the right time maybe. So, he wanted to call her. I think he didn’t know whether she would take his call, and he was so happy that he she did take his call, and they spoke. And I think he was, you know, I think they came to an agreement.
Martin: Did you encourage him to make that overture?
Biden: No, that was his decision.
It is certainly politically expedient for the Bidens is the political world (on both sides ideological spectrum) were to simply move on from that historic episode in Supreme Court hearing lore. But as was mentioned by Twitter doyen Yashar Ali, telling people to “move on” rarely works out that way. To wit:
The number one way to not move on from something, particularly in politics, is to tell people to move on. https://t.co/sQlUtSa5cz
— Yashar Ali ? (@yashar) May 7, 2019
Biden is currently leading the field of fellow Democratic presidential hopefuls in recent polls by a significant lead, though the primaries are a long way away. Either way, Joe Biden’s political past are so well known that it’s difficult to imagine Jill Biden’s comments changing many minds.
(Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
