Political Memory Short – and Fickle
Just days before the Des Moines Register endorsed Elizabeth Warren, the New York Times-Sienna poll showed Bernie Sanders with a six-point lead ahead of third-place Joe Biden. Anita Hill went to Iowa City and tore into Biden’s conduct as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee almost 30 years ago.
In the volatile race to the country’s first face-off of 2020, Hill – the witness at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings – reminded Hawkeyes that Biden was in charge of the process and did not allow three witnesses, who could have corroborated her story about Thomas’ alleged sexual harassment conduct, to testify.
According to the Daily Iowan, Hill, a distinguished professor of law at Brandeis University, responded to a questioner that, the “statute of limitations” had passed for Biden to say he was sorry.
Hill’s broader concern, she said, was that all presidential candidates had yet to state how each would address issues raised in the confirmation hearings over Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged treatment of women.
Have women forgiven Biden for the Thomas hearings? Or have they – and all Americans who care about decency – decided that nearly 30 years of public service have tended to wash away the hurt of those days in the fall of 1991?
I subscribe to the theory that political memory is short and fickle, if there’s any political memory at all. The successful politician must remind voters that any given candidate was a rogue 10, 20 or 30 years ago, and is still a scoundrel.
Or are the critical issues of the year 2020, such as climate change, a collapsing infrastructure, immigration, health care, education and foreign policy so important to voters that they will set aside the festering wounds left from conduct which outraged good people three decades ago that, remembering but forgiving, they’ll vote for Old Joe?
By next Wednesday morning, we’ll have seen how Iowans feel about the Democratic candidates. But everyone knows that what happens during the early days of the cycle doesn’t forecast what will happen in South Carolina or New Hampshire, or at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee this summer.
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