COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : A Display of Unmatched Cynicism : GOP tacticians made Hill and Thomas into right / wrong cartoons as Democrats dithered.

It was all so sad, really. Here were two articulate and substantial people filling out the contours of a thousand racist jokes. The happiest folks in front of their TV sets must have been members of the Ku Klux Klan, delighted to have as the story of the day a black Supreme Court nominee accused of boasting about his sexual prowess and size.

One could understand Clarence Thomas’ despairing fury. Here was a man who has constructed his entire political and intellectual persona around the proposition that race doesn’t matter, pushed by Anita Hill’s charges into the oldest racist stereotype of all, against which his best (but utterly tendentious) defense was that he was the victim of racist stereotyping.

It’s not as though one has to accept or discount a whole-cloth theory of Thomas’ personality as one--in the view of his defenders--absolutely incapable of the behavior attributed to him by Hill. After 400 years of the novel and 100 years of psychological case studies, one would have thought people adequately prepared for the concept that there is no absolute core “character,” that what’s “out of character” is often enough part of the character.

Even so, I’m not sure that the truth of the relationship between Thomas and Hill emerged fully, despite the detailed accounts of his harassment that so riveted the nation. The somewhat vindictive aggressiveness of Thomas’ harassment of Hill (as she recounted it) when she became his professional subordinate in Washington seemed to suggest a context that remained invisible.

Like many other people I found Hill credible, though again there is obviously much more to her personality than emerged in the schematic drama of the hearings. After all, both she and Thomas had, at different times, made very stark choices in their destinies, being immensely ambitious African-Americans deciding to win their seats on the Reagan bandwagon, at exactly the time that this same bandwagon was crushing millions of African-Americans into deeper economic misery.

This political context left no outward scars on Hill, whose function with Thomas in those Reagan years was to work in an institution contributing to the harassment of poor people and minorities, if only by bureaucratic indifference. But Thomas, particularly as he displayed himself in his enraged self-defense a week ago, is obviously tense with these contradictions,which at their worst produced his slurs on his sister as a welfare queen and at their more dignified find outlet in his essentially libertarian philosophical outlook.

The Republicans who are today exulting in victory may, down the years, live to regret the installation of someone as contradictory as Thomas on the Supreme Court. He’s spent a lot of his life seeking to please people who hate him, currying favor with the Man, being available as token and symbol. He’s made it now.

He made it courtesy of the Democrats. The Democrats on the Judiciary Committee gave him no truly hard time in interrogation, even before Anita Hill’s charges--which they had ignored--first surfaced. And when the extraordinary final chapter of the confirmation hearings began to unwind, the Democrats on the committee let him off the hook.

They allowed the Republicans to get away with their rabid counterattack immediately after Hill’s entirely persuasive testimony. They allowed Thomas to make his case on prime time. They suffered the initiative to slip away from them, even as Sens. Hatch, Specter and Simpson indulged themselves in some of the most absurd, despicable rhetorical posturing in political memory. The sole Democrat to energetically retrieve honor for his party, while justly rebuking his colleagues for their sorry performance, was Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

Nothing could match the cynicism of the Republican senators and the White House tacticians. Those who rode to victory in 1988 on the racist image of Willie Horton turned around and tried to destroy Anita Hill, pillorying her as part of some racist liberal conspiracy to victimize Thomas. Their long-term message to minorities: Thomas’ career is the model for self-advancement; the Democrats are the party of racial quotas and now of racial slurs.

Is it too much to hope that the Republican authors of this cynicism will suffer at the hands of people aghast at the hypocrisy of the proceedings and the treatment of Hill? If this affair is truly to be the Watergate of sexual harassment, there has to be revenge at the polls--and political candidates ready to seek and exact that retribution.