Several leading Democrats said on Friday that they had urged Biden in recent months to talk to Hill and try to address her concerns about the hearings. When he eventually called her this month, Hill left the conversation dissatisfied, she told The New York Times, while aides to Biden began preparing for criticism from women and liberals who they felt were unlikely to support him anyway.
Appearing on ABC’s “The View,” a show hosted and heavily watched by women, one day after he disclosed his call to Hill, Biden was nudged to go further and deliver a straightforward apology to her for his judgment and leadership as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman during the hearings.
Joy Behar, one of the hosts, suggested that Biden say to Hill, “‘I’m sorry for the way I treated you’ — not for the way you were treated.”
“I’m sorry for the way she got treated,” Biden responded, haltingly. “If you go back to what I said, and didn’t say, I don’t think I treated her badly.”
Biden sought to be proactive in reaching out to Hill, aides said, and they disclosed the phone call because they were convinced that in the Trump and #MeToo eras, the treatment of Hill and the explosive Senate hearings were bound to come up early in the campaign.
But as he indicated on television Friday, Biden does not believe he personally mistreated Hill. He has also privately indicated reluctance to apologize for behavior that he did not feel responsible for. And Hill’s continued criticism of Biden since his call with her has only affirmed the view of some in his orbit that he is in a no-win situation — that no measure of regret will ever be sufficient for her and other critics.
Biden’s advisers also expressed deep skepticism that liberals and others lashing him for not apologizing to Hill were ever going to back him in the most demographically diverse field in party history.
“Those who are attacking him about this are not going to change their minds about him,” said Anita Dunn, an adviser to Biden.
His surprising fundraising success on Friday — he announced that he raised $6.3 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign, the most yet of any Democratic candidate this year — may shift attention away from Hill and his broader vulnerabilities in the short term.But even some of his allies have little explanation for why he did not move more swiftly to attempt a rapprochement with Hill, who is now a Brandeis professor.
Biden’s awkward and at times grudging responses to questions about the hearings illustrate a larger dilemma for his campaign: He and his advisers have wrestled for months with the question of how to address Democratic concerns about his record without transforming his candidacy into a protracted apology tour.
More than any individual issue, they have feared that he could be drawn into a weekslong, self-flagellating retrospective, pushed to renounce one aspect of his record after another — on subjects ranging from school busing in the 1970s to credit card regulations and the Iraq War earlier this century.
Yet the matter of Hill may be a singular challenge for Biden and his campaign — a long-ago moment not only emblazoned in the liberal consciousness as a grave historical trauma, but also represented with immediacy in the present by a living person capable of rebuking Biden in forceful language, as Hill did this week.
“I cannot be satisfied by simply saying, ‘I’m sorry for what happened to you,’” she told The Times in a lengthy interview. “I will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and real purpose.”
Biden was asked about Hill as part of his “murder board” preparations with aides, but in the weeks leading up to his announcement Thursday there was no broader strategic discussion with his inner circle about whether to call her and what to say, according to Biden advisers.
A few weeks ago, though, one of his longtime colleagues finally took matters into her own hands.
Former Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, who was elected to her seat in the aftermath of the Thomas hearings, said she telephoned Steve Ricchetti, a Biden adviser, and urged him to take the Hill matter seriously. Shortly after, around the same time Biden telephoned Hill, the former vice president called Boxer to thank her for the nudge.
“I told him that it’s important to resolve this,” Boxer recalled in an interview Friday, adding that she pushed him and his campaign because, “I love Joe and I want Joe to step up on this.” Recalling his crafting the 1994 Violence Against Women Act and his effort to get her and another female senator seated on the Judiciary Committee, Boxer said Biden should be viewed by women for the totality of his record.
And she praised him for “stepping up” and addressing Hill.
But Biden might have mitigated his difficulties had he moved earlier and in a more full-throated fashion to demonstrate his regret, other Democrats said.
The Rev. Al Sharpton said Biden had acknowledged in a conversation this year that the Hill-Thomas hearings would be an issue for him if he entered the 2020 race. Sharpton said he had raised the subject with Biden after a January gathering of his group, the National Action Network, where Biden expressed regret for having backed certain hard-line anti-crime policies in the 1980s and 1990s.
“I told him after his speech at NAN that it was good he dealt with criminal justice, the crime bill, but you know Anita Hill and other stuff is going to come up if you run,” Sharpton said, recalling that Biden had replied, “Yeah, you’re right,” without hinting as to how he might address it.
Sharpton said Biden had room to make the case that he had “evolved” on his understanding of that moment in his career, but that Biden had to be unsparing in a critique of his own role.
“I don’t think you gain anything by trying to, in any way, lessen what was offensive to many of us,” Sharpton said. “What he’s got to say is, ‘Yes, I and the nation have evolved,’ but he can’t sugarcoat it.”
He had ample opportunity to act sooner.
Advisers to Biden fielded suggestions last fall that Biden contact Hill during the confirmation hearings of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, to explain that he better understood her experience after watching last year’s Supreme Court process as a private citizen. After making a private acknowledgment of error, the reasoning went, Biden could later say the same thing publicly.
Biden and his team did not take up the idea. At a campaign event in Rhode Island last year, he praised Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault, for giving “courageous, credible testimony” and suggested the process might have been handled more carefully in the days when he helmed the Judiciary Committee. But he made no reference to Hill or Thomas.
Biden has been keenly aware of the looming issue, even if he was slow to address it, according to people who spoke with him over the last year. He has been both reflective and defensive in private, recognizing that the hearings were disastrous but also arguing that he had done his best at the time.
His demeanor was similar on television Friday.
Biden’s decision to make “The View” his first sit-down interview after his presidential announcement all but ensured he would be pressed about Hill.
He spoke largely in the passive voice about how Hill was treated, despite the fact that he led the Senate committee when she testified before it.
Describing their phone call, he said: “I said privately what I’ve said publicly. I’m sorry she was treated the way she was treated. I wish we could have figured out a better way to get this done. I did everything in my power to do what I thought was within the rules to be able to stop things.”
“I don’t know why it took you so long to call her,” Ana Navarro, another host, said. “I wish it had happened earlier.”
“Since I had publicly apologized for the way she was treated,” Biden said, “I didn’t want to, quote, invade her space,” by calling her privately.
Asked if he would apologize to the women who have complained that he touched them inappropriately over the years, Biden responded, “Here’s the deal: I have to be much more aware of the private space of men and women — it’s not just women, but primarily women.”
Pressed further by the hosts, he said, “I’m really sorry if what I did in talking to them, trying to console, that in fact they took it a different way.” He then addressed the women directly, saying, “Sorry I invaded your space,” though he said he did not do anything to make anyone uncomfortable intentionally.
The interview was the first of only a handful of appearances and events that the Biden campaign has announced. He is set to deliver remarks to union members on Monday in Pittsburgh about “an inclusive middle class.” Then, for the third time, he will make his debut in first-in-the-nation Iowa as a presidential candidate.
At one point Friday, Biden wiped away a tear when he was asked whether he was running because of his son Beau, who died of cancer in 2015 at 46. “He’s not why I’m running, but I hope as I’ve — this sounds stupid,” Biden said, pausing to collect himself. “When I get up in the morning, I think about — I hope he’s proud of me. I hope he’s proud.”
Biden, whose first wife and infant daughter died in a car crash in 1972, also spoke about how grief had shaped his life. “It’s given me an incredible sense — I wish I didn’t possess it — of empathy, understanding,” he said.