Reply #5: On Joe's decision to back off more testimony I found this.. [View All]

[The Wielding Truth]

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/biden-and-anita-hill-revisited/

He made decisions, they wrote, based on his views of respect for a person’s privacy about what and wouldn’t be let into the hearings – including the pornography rentals and Mr. Thomas’s thin legal record. (At Saddleback, Mr. Obama, a former law professor at the University of Chicago said, “I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation.”)

(At one point, Senator Biden’s aides and then he told Ms. Abramson and Ms. Mayer that digging in too deep on Mr. Thomas’s intellectual legal prowess would’ve been a problem. One aide said, “it was a racial thing.” Mr. Biden himself said, “There was in fact a concern about whether or not to make the guy look stupid – what would happen if you embarrassed him.”)

In one interview, the two wrote that Mr. Biden said later that he had tried to be a statesman, to uphold decency standards. In the end, however, he conceded that his motivations might have been “misplaced.” On excluding the pornography issue alone, they quoted Mr. Biden as saying that he acted, “in fairness to Thomas, which in retrospect he didn’t deserve.”