WHEN Joseph R. Biden Jr. stands on the podium in Denver tonight as Barack Obama’s vice presidential nominee, conservatives of a certain age will see a bogeyman who, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, presided over the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.
Those hearings are to conservatives what the Clinton impeachment is to liberals, and conservatives blame Senator Biden for inaugurating the post-Bork politics of personal destruction. To them, Mr. Obama’s selection of Mr. Biden reveals the insincerity of his pledge to change politics as usual in Washington.
The charge is unfair. Twenty-one years ago, during the Bork nomination, I worked for Mr. Biden as an intern on the Senate Judiciary Committee. From that modest vantage point, I saw Mr. Biden struggle to focus the hearings on Judge Bork’s judicial philosophy rather than his private life, in the face of overwhelming political pressure from interest groups on the left. Mr. Biden’s efforts to protect Judge Bork’s and Judge Thomas’s privacy demonstrate that, although he was present at the creation of the post-Bork era, he did not cause it. On the contrary, he did everything in his power to resist the collapse of boundaries between nominees’ public and private lives.
When President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the court in 1987, some liberal senators and interest groups were eager to distort his record. Hours after the nomination was announced, for example, Senator Edward Kennedy charged that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/opinion/27rosen.html?th&emc=th
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