THERE WAS SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY ABOUT returning to the chambers of the Senate Judiciary Committee for another livid lesson in how America really lives. For the second time in less than two years, this time in the wake of a convulsive election, the American people took their leaders by surprise, sat them down, chewed them out, and then wearily explained in one-syllable words what voters feel they should be able to demand of the people with the privilege of borrowed power.
It turned out that Bill Clinton had something to learn. For the first half of the week, as the new President prayed and played and paraded and swore his oath of office, his nomination of Zoe Baird as Attorney General seemed nearly as secure as those of the rest of his Cabinet, stars and hacks alike. She had freely admitted hiring undocumented workers, to both Administration officials and Senators who were questioning her, and they had generally brushed it off as "an honest mistake." But within 72 hours, her nomination was unsalvageable, and she became the first U.S. Cabinet nominee in 120 years to withdraw her name from consideration.
In the middle of Baird's ordeal, Clinton awoke on a bright, glassy morning and embraced a quarter of a million people. He had promised upon his nomination that he stood for the people who paid their taxes and played by the rules, and he vowed upon his Inauguration "to reform our politics so that power and privilege no longer shout down the voice of the people." Before the day was over, it was the people who were shouting about something that outraged them, and by the end of the week the message finally got through.
Americans for the most part are enormously forgiving of wealth, remarkably tolerant of the gap between the rich and the poor in this country. But they reserve a special contempt for rich people who cheat. Outside Washington, the Baird story came across as an issue of people who play by the rules vs. those who don't and get away with it. Baird's story of the difficulty of finding safe, reliable child care might have won her the sympathy of millions of parents who face the same predicament. But when a couple with a net worth of more than $2 million hire not only an undocumented nanny but a driver as well, when they fail to pay the Social Security and workers' compensation taxes they owe, when a topflight corporate lawyer married to a renowned Yale law professor blames their troubles on "bad legal advice," the sympathy hardens into fury. As consumer advocate Ralph Nader observed, "This was a family that could afford to hire Mary Poppins."
The scene at the Senate played out like Kabuki theater. Here the ghost of Anita Hill welcomed two new committee members, Carol Moseley-Braun and Dianne Feinstein, who owed their election in some measure to her. Here sat some of the same members who had been lambasted for their handling of Hill, eager for the chance to display their elaborate courtesy and newfound sensitivity. Here was Hill's chief tormentor, Orrin Hatch, praising Baird's competence, her record as a corporate lawyer, knowing full well that for his conservative purposes Baird was the best candidate he could hope for, and if he saved her job she owed him.