Michelle Goldberg, Michelle Goldberg, American blogger and author/The New York Times

Her testimony was heroic. Will it be pointless?

On Thursday, Christine Blasey Ford testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the world, that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both teenagers. Her soft voice cracked as she spoke. She smiled a lot; her attempts to make everyone see how agreeable and reasonable she is were heart-rending. But she was also poised and precise, occasionally speaking as an expert — she’s a psychology professor — as well as a victim. Watching her push through her evident terror was profoundly inspiring.
The hearing, by contrast, was profoundly dispiriting. If I were allowed to curse in The New York Times, this column would be one word repeated over and over. There is no reason Republicans had to put Blasey through that cruel, wrenching process. It made sense for her to testify, but not like that, as if she were on trial, or imposing on the committee’s precious time. It’s inexcusable that Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge, who Blasey identifies as a witness to the alleged assault, hasn’t been questioned, and that there are no plans to do so. Perhaps if senators had heard sworn testimony from Judge — who wrote books detailing his youthful binge drinking — they might have decided to call the whole degrading spectacle off.

Blasey asked the Republicans on the panel — all of them men — to engage with her directly, one human being to another. Instead, they had her interrogated about minutia by a female prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell, brought in to give them cover. The prosecutor’s questions seemed like setups for gotcha moments that never came. Mitchell largely ignored the alleged crime itself, instead trying to catch Blasey on extraneous matters, like the fact that she’s traveled on airplanes despite her stated fear of flying.
Nevertheless, Blasey maintained her composure. She responded without guile, as if the whole ordeal really were a collaborative fact-finding endeavor. She was widely seen as credible, and not just by feminists inclined to sympathize with her. “This is a disaster for the Republicans,” said Fox News’s Chris Wallace.
Perhaps, but the day was also a disaster for the rest of us. Watching Blasey was excruciating, like seeing someone without circus training forced to walk a tightrope between skyscrapers. When her testimony was done, I felt relief, but also redoubled rage. To be treated as remotely credible, she had to be nearly perfect. She is a well-educated, blond, heterosexual mother; Republican Senator Orrin Hatch described her as “attractive” and “pleasing.” Her Ph.D. in psychology allowed her to speak fluently about the neurobiology of her own trauma. Because of her expertise, she wasn’t confused or defensive about why she remembered some details of the night in question but not others. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said, recalling the way Kavanaugh and Judge allegedly enjoyed themselves at her expense.
Yet even near perfection, in this case, is probably not enough.
In contrast to Blasey, Kavanaugh was all snide, self-pitying fury. His testimony was needlessly misleading. He downplayed his youthful drinking, despite plenty of evidence that he was a sloppy drunk. (One former Yale roommate described him, in a statement, as a “notably heavy drinker” who became “belligerent and aggressive” when intoxicated.) Either he was dishonest about the common meaning of slang terms that he used in his yearbook, or his crowd had an extremely unique vernacular. His claim that there was nothing sexist or malicious in the phrase “Renate Alumnius” — a boast, in his yearbook, about a girl he and his friends all knew — strains credulity.
Kavanaugh’s apoplectic, ultra-partisan opening statement should alone disqualify him. Certainly, if he’s innocent of any violence against Blasey — or if, more likely, he doesn’t remember it — his anger is understandable. But there’s no way a man who rails against Democrats for seeking “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” can even feign impartiality. “You sowed the wind for decades to come,” he told Democratic senators. Soon he may be in a position to seek his own retribution on the Supreme Court.
But thanks to the Republican majority in the Senate, Kavanaugh didn’t have to be convincing to Democrats. His performance was for the conservative base, to whom he now appears as a martyr to the vicious left, a paragon of a man brought low by the inquisitorial forces of #MeToo. What seemed to the left like a tantrum over thwarted entitlement was, to the right, a moving display of indignation. “That was simply tremendous — appropriately angry, personal, wrenching, detailed, persuasive,” tweeted Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. “He helped himself immensely.”
In her opening statement, Blasey described why she’d been reluctant to go public with her story. “I believed that if I came forward, my voice would be drowned out by a chorus” of Kavanaugh’s powerful supporters, she said. She may have been correct. By the time the hearing ended, the right seemed more committed to Kavanaugh than ever, and his confirmation appeared inevitable. “Judge Kavanaugh showed America exactly why I nominated him,” tweeted President Trump. He did indeed.