Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

by Thomas Frank

One point where Clinton’s obliviousness to the situation of ordinary people became conspicuous was in the brief tussle over his first choice for attorney general: one Zoë Baird, a typically well-connected corporate lawyer who was married to a famous law professor at Yale. Between the two of them, Baird and her husband made more than six hundred and fifty grand per year, but still they saw fit to pay their two undocumented domestic servants a little more than $250 per week, without having initially made the required Social Security payments. Had Baird been a Bush appointee, this would no doubt have constituted a living lesson in how class and inequality work—a teachable moment, as people like to say. But of course it wasn’t that at all. It was scarcely anything. The Clinton vetting team wasn’t put off by it in the least. They thought it was just a “yuppie crime,” the columnist Clarence Page joked. Offensive to you, maybe, but in the circles in which these people traveled it was about as dreadful as the rule-breaking fun of Ferris Bueller and his pals.13 Congress did not find it so petty, however, and the Baird nomination had to be withdrawn.