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To be fair, the White House was not alone in underestimating the depth of feeling. For days the editorial writers and pundits tiptoed around the controversy. "Is this minor scandal troubling?" asked the Los Angeles Times. "Yes. Should it embarrass Clinton and the Bairds? Most certainly. Should it disqualify Baird from being Attorney General? We think not." But the people's press, especially the radio shows, came down very differently. "Talk shows were like town meetings," says Estrich. "When an issue takes hold with the people, you don't need a formal political process for the country to reach a decision. They reached it on their own, without leadership from Washington, and communicated that decision to the talk shows and television shows, and the matter was concluded within a few days."
But Clinton somehow still managed to miss the point. In his statements after her withdrawal, Clinton declared that he was "accepting the judgment" of his nominee that she would not be able to serve effectively. He made no moral judgment of his own; in fact, his letter to Baird said he would like to find another place for her in his Administration. Spokesman George Stephanopoulos suggested that the President thought Baird would make a fine Attorney General and that he was not happy that she withdrew. But that left him in a small minority.
Clinton had, in a sense, set himself up. For more than a year he had promised Americans a higher moral standard. He learned early on the depth of the public's resentment at the way elected officials arrive in Washington and instantly set about ignoring or rewriting the rules. He played on the fury at a government that does not pay its bills, exempts itself from civil rights laws, exploits its power for profit. He spoke of sacrifice, of middle-class tax relief, of returning government to the people who pay for it. He called himself the man from Hope, Arkansas, born into a single-parent family, who understood about hard times.
But then he and his team were put to the test. One after another the signals came: Chelsea's private school, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's reluctance to sever his ties to his lucrative clients, the corporate sponsorship of the Inaugural hoopla. He nominated a core of advisers that included 14 lawyers, many of them multimillionaires, all of them earning more than $100,000 -- a feat matched by only 3% of all Americans. His inner circle belongs to a class defined not by its inheritance but by its graduate degrees. At least five, like Clinton, studied in England, and half a dozen attended Harvard, Yale or Georgetown, the same schools as the President and Vice President Al Gore. Their promise is to be the brilliant, creative, technocratic problem solvers -- not the same old elitists behaving as elitists behave.