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Some of the callers last week reminded the lawmakers that citizens are required to obey even the laws that they disagree with, or are inconvenient, or are hard to enforce. The anger reflected an impatience with the notion that this generation can pick and choose which rules are worth obeying. "We've excused all the hippie crimes," says Sheila Bihary, a 45-year-old San Francisco lawyer. "Now we've got the yuppie crimes, but these are the same people who used to be hippies."
It is possible to have enormous sympathy for the pain of working parents trying to do right by their children, and to have little for Zoe Baird. Millions of working men and women lose sleep every night wondering whether their children are safe during the day. The search for someone they are willing to trust their children with can be endless, the paperwork onerous, the expense breaking. It is an entirely different task from finding a reliable mechanic or a gifted gardener. Simply understanding the laws that apply would take the mind of a law professor -- like the one Baird married.
Baird was not without defenders, particularly among parents with firsthand experience of a child-care nightmare. "It is ironic," wrote columnist Anna Quindlen, "that the first woman Attorney General-designate has been tripped up by that thing that trips us up day after day, makes us late for meetings, causes us to call in sick when we are well: the struggle for good surrogate care for our kids. Hard sometimes even if you are well to do. Horrid often if you are not." Anne Nelson, author of "Rock-a-Bye Nino: Confessions of a White Mother with a Brown Caregiver" in Mother Jones, contends that "Professional women with the income and requirements of child care are saying, 'Why is the Washington male crowd picking on this woman?' " They may be sympathetic to Baird, she says, because they know how precarious the relationship between parents and caregivers can be. "You feel you want professional qualifications -- some sense of child development -- yet you're offering the working conditions of a servant. For both sides, the whole ) situation is a disaster."
If the President ended the week regretting the sour finale to his Inaugural week, then he was missing a great opportunity. The outcry over Zoe Baird was a noisy reminder of how deeply voters wanted to believe his promises about a new way of doing business in the capital. It would have been a sad start to a historic presidency if Americans had been willing to accept anything less than the ideals that Clinton himself did so much to renew.