Thumbs Down

By NANCY GIBBS

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

With reporting by Ann Blackman and Michael Duffy/Washington and Priscilla Painton/New York