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Having a blue-chip resume is fine, but not at the expense of sensitivity to everyone else's plight. "This is a crowd that doesn't have the stature to demand sacrifice," says Kevin Phillips, author of the new book Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity. "These are people who spent Vietnam in Oxford; they are $500,000 lawyers who hire illegal immigrants as baby-sitters; they are hotshot lobbyists. This group has no understanding of the kind of sacrifices made every day by the $26,000-a-year couple in Peoria, Illinois. They don't speak the language of the older generation that fought in World War II or the language of the under-30 generation that hasn't shared in the circumstances of the boomers."
During the campaign, it often seemed that Clinton's great political gift was his ability to mediate between his friends in the intellectual elite and his friends in Arkansas. "He has tried to present the ideas of the elite to ordinary people, and he has tried to present ordinary people to the elite," observes Ralph Whitehead, journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "He can speak wonk, and he can speak American." But that is too rare a skill in his present circle. "On the campaign trail, he had Jim Carville, who had no trouble making himself understood in barrooms. He needs people in the Administration who will do the same."
Those around him in charge of finding, vetting and recommending appointees like Zoe Baird did not share the populist instincts of campaign advisers like Carville and Paul Begala. Even according to officials who participated in the Baird case, it is not surprising that high-paid, high-powered corporate lawyers did not see trouble coming. When Clinton put millionaire superlawyers Warren Christopher and Vernon Jordan in charge of his transition, he laid the foundation for Baird's destruction. "What happened here," said a transition official, "was that a lot of people who live in million-dollar houses and think nothing of hiring illegals were in charge of the process."
The tax evasion alone should have been enough to disqualify Baird, whatever her salary. Baird explained that she and her husband had been sponsoring their employees for U.S. citizenship and that their violation was a "legal technicality." Even after it all unraveled, some still just didn't get it. In her letter to Clinton, Baird said she was "surprised at the extent of the public reaction."
If Clinton is still struggling to understand the anger, he might want to talk to his own Labor Secretary, Robert Reich. In his book The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, Reich describes how America's new professional elite has grown ever more distant from the rest of society and disengaged itself from communal spaces, institutions and obligations. "The most skilled and insightful Americans," he wrote, "who are already positioned to thrive in the world market, are now able to slip the bonds of national allegiance, and by so doing disengage themselves from their less-favored fellows. The stark political challenge in the decade ahead will be to affirm that, even though America is no longer a separate and distinct economy, it is still a society whose members have abiding obligations to one another."