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And here was the first woman ever nominated for the nation's top law- enforcement job being drawn and quartered for the decisions she made about her child's care. But as hot an issue as working motherhood may be, this was not about child care, not about motherhood, not really much of a gender battle at all, as the furious phone calls from men and women across the country attested. Though there was much comment over what looked like a convenient double standard -- had a male nominee ever been asked about his child-care arrangements? -- the gender issue was quickly neutralized when two respected women lawmakers, Senator Nancy Kassebaum and Representative Marge Roukema, along with former Representative Barbara Jordan, came out against the nomination. Rookie Democrats Moseley-Braun and Feinstein were in no way inclined to ride to Baird's rescue. Feinstein, from California, knows something about the exploitation of undocumented workers, and Braun, a black woman from Chicago, knows something about who loses the jobs that illegals take.
Fifteen months ago in these chambers, Clarence Thomas tried to turn his confirmation into a race issue, to minimize the gender battle. Baird shrewdly cast her trouble in gender terms, thereby discounting the simple issue of hypocrisy. "Quite honestly, I was acting at that time really more as a mother than as someone who would be sitting here designated to be Attorney General." The implication was that if she had known that she might one day be called on to enforce these laws, she would never have broken them. This time around, the Judiciary Committee got the point.
"Do you have any sense of the feelings of outrage," asked Judiciary Committee chairman Joseph Biden, "about the action taken by you and your husband? There are millions of Americans out there who have trouble taking care of their children, with one-fiftieth the income that you and your husband have, and they do not violate the law." In a moment of near moral unanimity, the hosts, pollsters and casual eavesdroppers all seemed to echo the anger. "This counted to people," says University of Southern California law professor Susan Estrich, who managed Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign in 1988 and now hosts a radio talk show. "It was an issue people could understand and get their hands on much more than who is funding which party."
Feinstein's offices in Washington and San Francisco received more than 3,000 calls, 2,872 of them opposing Baird's confirmation. "We have people who can't put food on their tables, who commit crimes and get hammered," says David Tuma, a retired Navy officer and father of four from Port Hueneme, California. "Then you have a person who doesn't have to worry about that and makes an unethical choice, and we want to make them Attorney General. I can't put the two of those together very well."