Excepting the differences one would expect among independent thinkers, Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork are cut from the same judicial cloth. And so he too was a symbol that had to be destroyed. The attack on Clarence Thomas, which boggled tens of millions of viewing Americans, makes sense only if one understands that the roots of the struggle extend back to 1980 and Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency. One of the most persistent arguments of those who opposed the Reagan era was that it was a fluke, that he was simply not elected President because people agreed with his conservative political philosophy. Believing this to be true, opponents of the Reagan presidency then argued that his nomination of the like-minded Judge Bork was also illegitimate. As they put it, "out of the mainstream." We have argued continuously during these years that this argument was false, that the voters had indeed entrusted Ronald Reagan with a mandate (his campaign positions were clear) and that the losing side was trying to overturn the results of these elections. With the televised Thomas hearings we have in effect just held another national election. And the public, by every measure available, gave Judge Thomas what in a normal election would be called their landslide support. This doesn't mean that the American people support Judge Thomas -- or Robert Bork or Ronald Reagan -- in every detail of their political beliefs. It is likely even that on the abortion issue, most voters are essentially pro-choice. We don't doubt, however, that in terms of the presidency or the Supreme Court, voters are willing to risk disappointment on discrete issues if they approve the fundamental direction. They have now given their consent in three successive presidential elections to a direction that can fairly be called conservative. The Supreme Court nominations of George Bush comport with those results. The difference, however, between the American people and the permanent political establishment in Washington is that Washington no longer feels constrained by the American political system. It won't wait for the next election, nor -- more importantly -- will it make the effort to persuade the electorate to support its views of Supreme Court nominations. They'd rather fight their battles inside the Beltway, which lets them operate free of input from this nation's huge electorate. They can't possibly have wanted the sexual harassment charge against Clarence Thomas to go before the entire American population. It did, and they were undone by a system that they made. That system has depended crucially on the support of an ideologically compliant Washington press corps, which would normally render a target politically controversial and, in a risk-averse town, untouchable. Cut off from their support base, Judge Bork, Ed Meese, Oliver North and others have been left bleeding on the Washington fields. With Judge Thomas, however, the system ran out of control. Washington's reporters, who had already largely broken away from the editorial controls of traditional journalism, even broke away from the congressional staffs and special-interest groups, building the sexual harassment story into a bonfire of personal and political grievances. They seemed to be demanding a national referendum on sexual harassment, meaning a Senate vote for the accuser, and instead the whole nation showed up and a big majority voted the other way -- to support Clarence Thomas. Perhaps the voters felt they couldn't trust Washington or Congress with something important. Now, with Clarence Thomas heading for the Court and the voters going back to their daily lives, what has been learned? The Democratic Party has to decide whether its future lies with the world view of the special-interest groups and anonymous congressional staff, or with people such as Bill Clinton, Doug Wilder, Paul Tsongas and others, mostly beyond-the-Beltway governors, trying to conform the party's historic ideals to the temper of the modern electorate. The congressional and White House Republicans should have learned that in a period of divided government, they can only win, as here, by abandoning their traditional passivity in favor of going on the offensive, and without apology. Black Americans have perhaps the greatest sorting out to do. The bonfire illuminated the existence of an impressive, moderate black middleclass. If there is a group of true political independents in this country, they are it. It looks as if they have a lot to say to Democrats, Republicans and white feminists. They should stick around and keep talking. As for Clarence Thomas, we don't agree that he joins the Court in a damaged state. This country is in the middle of a historic political turning. There was no reason to expect that the overturning of the old order would be quiet or easy. But history will note that at the moment Clarence Thomas was about to be destroyed by the old order, the American people came forward and by the millions confirmed his appointment to the Supreme Court. It looks to us as if Clarence Thomas is the first Justice to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court with a popular mandate.
The real battle over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas was joined four years ago with the nomination of Robert Bork, but the roots of the struggle go back even farther to the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. The voters gave Reagan a mandate but the losers overturned the results of the election by engineering Bork's rejection. In that case, it took only one vote for the Senate majority leader, Howard Baker, and his fellow Republicans to block President Reagan's nominee from being confirmed. But by every measure available the public gave Thomas landslide support and Thomas is the first Justice to sit on the Supreme Court with a popular mandate.