Reversal of Fortune: Image of , Brighter in Hindsight, Galvanizes Campaigns --- A Year After Hearings, She Inspires Many Women To Challenge Incumbents --- Mor e Voter s Believe Her Now By JILL ABRAMSON Staff Reporter of 2234 words 5 October 1992 The Wall Street Journal J PAGE A1 English (Copyright (c) 1992, Dow Jones & Co., Inc.)

WASHINGTON -- Anita F. Hill was the loser in her battle with a year ago. But as time passes, she is looking more and more like the winner.

In the year since her Senate testimony alleging sexual harassment by the Supreme Court nominee, the University of Oklahoma law professor has become a catalyst for candidacies by women across the country. And those candidates are better financed, and have better chances of winning, than ever before.

Virtually every national poll conducted at the time of her explosive Senate testimony showed that a large majority of Americans -- including women -- believed Mr. Thomas's vigorous denials of her charges.

But in a remarkable turnaround, the latest Wall Street Journal/ NBC News poll finds that 44% of registered voters now say they believe Prof. Hill told the truth, while only 34% say Justice Thomas did. In October of 1991, the same poll had shown Justice Thomas believed by 47% and Prof. Hill believed by 24%. The new poll also shows that a 47% plurality of voters think the Senate failed to treat Prof. Hill properly and respectfully.

In the year since their famous confrontation, both Prof. Hill and Justice Thomas have adopted low public profiles. But today, she is being celebrated while he is being ignored. "Anita Hill has changed the face of politics this year," says Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat who is one of 11 women Senate candidates this fall. "Millions of women have been motivated by that vision on our TV set."

At the Democratic convention in July, Prof. Hill's name drew the most sustained applause from delegates. Conversely, Justice Thomas's name was hardly mentioned at the Republican convention. "The GOP, wrongly, has been unwilling to acknowledge the significant plus to this administration of the appointment of Clarence Thomas," says Terry Eastland, a prominent conservative who served in the Reagan Justice Department.

It isn't only in politics that the Hill-Thomas hearings have had a major impact. In the last year, a record-breaking number of sexual harassment charges -- 7,407 -- have been filed, according to statistics compiled by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Charges filed in the first half of the 1992 fiscal year were up by more than 50% over the same period a year ago.

But as the 1992 elections approach, Prof. Hill's impact is most evident in the large number of women running for, and favored to win, seats in the House and Senate. Even by the most cautious estimates, there will be at least two new female senators elected this year (currently there are three), and it's possible that as many as a half dozen could win. The number of women in the House is also expected to increase from the current 26 to at least 40, and more women are likely to be elected to scores of other j obs across the nation.

There are other reasons for this surge in women candidates besides Prof. Hill, of course. Over the past several years, more and more women have been elected to lower offices, and now they are rising through the political ranks. In addition, the very fact that women have had a smaller share of political power is working to their advantage this year, given the nation's anti-insider, anti-incumbent mood.

Nor is the Hill-Thomas issue a sure-fire guarantee of political success. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Senate candidate Lynn Yeakel, whose rise was fueled by anger over the hearings, hasn't broadened her focus sufficiently to attract more general-election support. Having blown an early lead in the polls, she now trails incumbent Republican Arlen Specter, Prof. Hill's chief inquisitor on the Judiciary Committee.

But even Sen. Specter has found it necessary to all but grovel in apology for his performance in the hearings. One of his ads features the widow of Sen. John Heinz, the popular Pennsylvanian who died in a plane crash last year. "I don't think you can agree with any senator on every issue, and I certainly didn't agree with Arlen Specter during the Clarence Thomas hearings," a denim-clad Teresa Heinz says in the spot. "Nevertheless, I'm supporting him."

What factors have caused the profound change in public opinion to Prof. Hill's side? There have been no substantive new disclosures about the truth of either her allegations or Justice Thomas's flat denial. If anything, conservative supporters of Justice Thomas have continued energetically to raise questions about Prof. Hill's credibility.

David Brock, author of a lengthy attack on Prof. Hill that appeared in the conservative publication The American Spectator, believes Prof. Hill has benefited from the passage of time because "as we get away from the facts of the case, the more this has all been taken to a metaphysical level and filtered through the media elite."

Clint Bolick, a friend of Justice Thomas, agrees. "The revisionist history has been pervasive and very frustrating," he says. "The assumption is that he is guilty, and that's filtered down to TV sitcoms. The notion of Clarence Thomas's guilt has seeped into the national consciousness."

A sitcom did play a serious role here. Furious over the Judiciary Committee's treatment of Prof. Hill, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the creator of the television show "Designing Women," churned out an episode called "The Strange Case of Clarence and Anita," which was broadcast by CBS shortly after Justice Thomas's swearing in. Ms. Bloodworth-Thomason calls her script "a valentine to all the women who thought Anita Hill was treated unfairly," and the show provoked a big response, most of it positive.

Soon after the episode aired, the writer, who is a close friend of Bill and , took a tape of it to a Hollywood women's fund-raising reception for Rep. Barbara Boxer, who was then an underdog candidate in the Democratic primary for the Senate in California. The checkbooks that opened that night contained the first contributions from women, who eventually helped bankroll Rep. Boxer's campaign with almost $1 million. She won the primary and now is one of the women favored to win Senate seats next month.

In terms of fund raising, women candidates are breaking all previous records this year. During the second quarter of 1992, Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley Braun -- who unseated an incumbent Democrat who had voted to confirm Justice Thomas -- raised more money than any other Senate candidate.

Meanwhile, Emily's List, which helps fund the campaigns of Democratic women who favor abortion rights, has increased its membership from 3,500 at the time of the hearings to 22,000 today, and has raised $4.5 million for candidates, up from $1.5 million in 1990.

Mr. Bolick and other defenders of Justice Thomas watch the changing public mood with frustration. In the cloistered atmosphere of the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas is in the worst possible place to mount a counteroffensive, they note; any overt effort to defend his name would be deemed improper.

Former Thomas aide Armstrong Williams, one of the justice's most stalwart defenders, does remind reporters that Justice Thomas enjoys a public following. "He's received 20,000 letters of support," Mr. Williams notes.

But in campaign after campaign, it is the image of Prof. Hill, not Justice Thomas, that is invoked. Rep. Boxer, for instance, has used photos of herself leading a group of women House members up the Capitol steps to protest the Senate's handling of Prof. Hill's allegations. Ms. Murray, a Washington state senator who is running ahead of her GOP opponent, says she decided to launch her bid for the Senate because she watched the Hill-Thomas hearings and "didn't see myself up there."

The tableau of the hearings, observes Maryland Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski, "left an indelible mark on the American psyche."

One sign of that mark has been the degree to which a number of male Senate incumbents have been engaging in displays of gender sensitivity virtually since the day they voted to confirm Justice Thomas and their switchboards were jammed with calls from angry female constituents. Trying to prove that they have gotten the message, many of them began attending monthly evening seminars on "gender dynamics" that have included speakers such as Deborah Tannen, who wrote the best-seller "You Just Don't Understand," about miscommunication between men and women.

In a dizzying display over the past two weeks, the Senate's women-friendly votes included one to override President Bush's veto of family leave legislation, a move to cut more than $200 million from military projects and divert the funds into breast cancer research, and an effort to overturn the Bush administration's "gag rule" on abortion clinics.

Despite being on the opposing side of these issues, the Bush administration has itself tried to respond to the stirrings of angry women. A number of women, including Labor Secretary Lynn Martin and Marilyn Quayle, addressed the GOP convention. But, according to the most recent Journal/ NBC poll, President Bush still suffers from a stunning gender gap among women voters under 40 (some 20% of the electorate), trailing Democrat Bill Clinton by 32% to 61%.

With less fanfare, the White House has held training sessions to raise sensitivity about the issue of sexual harassment, as have other federal agencies. Employees at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., for example, received a stern warning from their Equal Employment Opportunity office not to make "elevator eyes" or to refer to colleagues as "girl, hunk, doll, babe, or even honey."

All of this, in one way or another, goes back to Anita Hill, who has grown in stature even as she has receded from the public eye. "The myth of Anita Hill is stronger than her physical presence," says Louise Hilson, a Washington public- relations consultant who has helped Prof. Hill deal with the media.

Ms. Hilson and other acquaintances of Prof. Hill attribute her positive standing with the public to the way she has comported herself in the wake of her sudden celebrity. Prof. Hill, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has made a few paid speeches at universities and before professional groups, commanding fees as high as $11,000. (Recently, she canceled a planned appearance at Old Dominion University after some students protested her $10,000 fee at a time when the university is enacting budget cuts and tuition increases.)

But mostly she has focused her public appearances -- most of them unpaid -- on the issue of sexual harassment, staying away from personal reflections and never mentioning Clarence Thomas. Danny Stern of the Leigh Bureau in Princeton, N.J., who books her speeches, says she has turned down several more-lucrative speaking invitations from large corporations and other groups, as well as rich book and movie deals.

While in Seattle to attend a luncheon honoring her sponsored by the Washington State Trial Lawyers Association, Prof. Hill met privately with Kari Tupper, whose complaint that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by Democratic Sen. Brock Adams in 1987 was never officially acted upon. (Sen. Adams announced he would not run for re-election after the Seattle Times printed the stories of eight women who also said they were sexually harassed or assaulted by him, although he has denied all charges, including Ms. Tupper's.) "I wanted to meet her to talk to her about what do you do with the fact that people haven't believed you," explains Ms. Tupper. She says the meeting helped "lift the burden of continuing to question myself" about why her allegations against Sen. Adams weren't believed. "It took the pressure off me. Here I'd thought, if only I'd been more articulate, if only I'd finished my degree."

Prof. Hill is marking the anniversary of the hearings and Justice Thomas's confirmation with a public appearance in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 16, when she is to co-host a day-long conference at Georgetown University Law Center on "Race, Gender and Power in America." She is also expected to be interviewed on national television some time this week.

Emma Coleman Jordan, a Georgetown law professor and friend of Prof. Hill who is co-hosting the conference, isn't surprised by the shift the Journal found in its recent polling. "Those earlier polls were taken in the middle of an earthquake," Prof. Jordan observes. "The profound changes brought up in the hearings hadn't been absorbed. The words ` sexual harassment' weren't words most people had heard before."

Poll experts agree. "When people made their mind up at the time it was a snap decision," says David Moore, director of the survey center at the University of New Hampshire. "It was made on flimsy evidence. Those kinds of views can be easily changed."

--- To Tell the Truth

Who do you think was telling the truth about Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas?

OCT. '91 SEPT. '92

Anita Hill 24% 44% Clarence Thomas 40% 34%