“Her leadership, her voice, her perspective was just really critical,” Klain said, “in bringing the committee, you know, into the 20th century, and to confronting a bunch of issues that it absolutely, positively had to confront.”

“It says a lot about Senator Moseley Braun. And it says a lot about Biden,” Geoff Gibbs, who is black and was Moseley Braun’s chief counsel and had worked for Biden as a policy aide in the ’80s, told me.

“At the time she was the only black person in the Senate to speak out on behalf of all black Americans on this issue. And he did everything he could to support her, both kind of politically and personally. He stood by her side, and I was there to see it,” he said. “Joe Biden was a key ally, his support was unwavering, and it was critical. And I believe then, and I believe now, that it was heartfelt.”

Was he at any point “agonizing,” as Totenberg had reported at the outset? Did he need extra convincing?

“He didn’t,” Moseley Braun told me. “Here’s the thing: I went to Joe and said, ‘Look, this is not right.’” She said she couldn’t support it. “And he was sympathetic,” she explained. “I did not know at the time what kind of pressure he was getting from the other side.”

“I don’t think anybody that didn’t have maybe one foot somewhat in the institutional camp and then one foot forward could have really made that transition,” said Spinelli. “And I would make the same argument now.”

Right now, it’s not really the argument Biden is making.

The twin pillars of his presidential bid seem to be competence and compassion. He’s running as maybe dull but dependable, and as the empathetic prospective grief counselor in chief. And the sale is necessarily complicated by the knotty realities of Biden’s long public life. He was the right-hand man to the nation’s first black president, but he also was anti-busing and a designer of the crime bill many view as having made life worse for black families. Working across the aisle with Republicans like Thurmond and Helms may once have seemed admirably pragmatic but now looks like excessive deference to some of his most retrograde colleagues. Sifting through Biden’s record, a higher-up operative who worked on a different Democratic 2020 presidential campaign told me the other day, is to grapple with the tangled history of modern America overall. “It becomes like a fucking scarf trick with a goddamn party clown,” this person said. “For every good thing, three other bullshit things are attached—because that’s how history works.”

And when it comes to Joe Biden’s record on race and women, talking about Carol Moseley Braun almost can’t help but mean talking about Anita Hill as well.