Advise and Dissent

• Share

(4 of 4)

For Chairman Biden, the hearings could provide a spark for his presidential campaign by giving him a chance to show his mettle in front of a national television audience. Yet his passion and propensity to rattle on could be his undoing. When Secretary of State George Shultz testified on South Africa last summer, Biden's angry attack on Shultz left some viewers with an intemperate image of the Senator. As Biden concedes, "Exposure is good only if you do well, only if you appear knowledgeable and fair." Both Democrat DeConcini and Republican Hatch have warned somewhat hyperbolically that if Bork's opponents on the committee attack the judge too aggressively, it could spoil the Democrats' chances of regaining the White House.

More important than all the political gambits and the thunder from both ends of the spectrum will be the testimony of one man. "If you are looking for a secret weapon in the upcoming confirmation hearings," says Hatch, "it is Judge Robert Bork. The longer he testifies before the Judiciary Committee, the more persuasive and reasoned his philosophy of judicial restraint will sound." Armed with an agile mind and a caustic wit, Bork is expected to be a formidable opponent for his critics on the committee. "Any Senator who decides to just jump in and portray Bork as some racist, some evil Neanderthal, is going to be in deep trouble," says Republican Committee Member Alan Simpson of Wyoming. Many hopeful conservatives, remembering the turnabout in public opinion during the Iran-contra hearings, envision Bork as "Ollie North without the medals."

To prevent a replay of the surge in sympathy for North, Biden has ordered that the table for the committee members be placed at the same level as that of the witness. In the Iran-contra hearings, where the congressional members sat on a dais, the television cameras made it seem that they were lecturing and hectoring the witnesses from on high.

In the television age, the way Bork comes across could be critically important. Both sides of the debate pay lip service to the notion that they do not want to see the issue politicized. That objective is not necessarily all that laudable, and certainly not all that likely. The confirmation of such an ideologically controversial nominee, one whose effect on the court and the nation could be enormous for years to come, is ultimately a political matter. If Americans watching the hearings this week like what they see, if they are reassured by either Bork's mind or his manner, the advice and consent of the public will certainly be felt on the Senate floor. And if the public becomes convinced that Bork's views are, as opponents charge, so far from the mainstream that they seem to threaten the rights that Americans have come to cherish, such sentiments will likewise probably prevail when the final votes are counted.