Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 23, 1993 TAG: 9301250256
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THE ZAPPING OF ZOE
IN WITHDRAWING her nomination as attorney general, Zoe Baird has done Bill Clinton a favor.It's a defeat for the new administration. Worse, though, would have been outright Senate rejection of the nominee - a reasonable possibility even if Clinton were prepared to expend heavy political capital in her defense, which he obviously wasn't.
Opposition from senators themselves did not bring down the nomination so much as opposition from the public - expressed via faxes, phone calls and opinion polls. In a way, it was the new administration's first brush with electronic democracy.
The outrage was certainly understandable. What might have been a blemish for some Cabinet appointees was a signal difficulty, and rightly so, for an attorney nominated to be America's top law-enforcement officer and overseer of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Baird, illegal-immigrant warts and all, compared favorably with many previous occupants of the office, frequently used by presidents as a reward for political cronyism or worse. Clearly, the public is demanding higher standards of its attorneys general than in the past. That's good.
It will be good, too, if public pressure for higher standards persists on other matters. (Let the president and Congress be reminded, for instance, that higher ethics in Washington ought to make serious campaign-finance reform a top priority.)
Such public zeal, however, is not always an unalloyed blessing.
For one thing, it thirsts often for simplicity. It was wrong of Baird and her husband to knowingly hire in 1990 an illegal-immigrant couple, she to provide live-in care for Baird's preschool son and he to Baird's part-time driver. The question is: How wrong?
This was a violation of civil, not criminal law. The Peruvian couple were hired through an agency, after attempts to find U.S. citizens or documented aliens for the work, and were paid a $24,000 salary plus room and board. Employment of the couple was reported to the Department of Labor in 1991 as part of the process for getting their immigration papers. This was well before Clinton was regarded as a likely president, let alone Baird as a possible attorney general.
The thirst for simplicity can have the perverse effect of discouraging official forthrightness. Less disclosure and more dissembling might have improved Baird's chances. And her chances might have been better, too, if her record instead had involved, say, an abstruse conflict-of-interest scam, more serious but harder for the public to connect with.
There's a danger, too, of ethical zeal masking darker impulses. Some of the hue and cry over Baird may have reflected aspects of the American psyche little related to her qualifications. Resentment against immigrants, for instance, is not entirely unknown in this country.
Nor can many working American couples afford to solve their child-care problems by hiring live-in employees whoever they are. Pulling down more than $600,000 annually (most of it her salary at Aetna Life & Casualty Co.), corporate lawyer Baird and her law-professor husband obviously could. In a nation where two-income families are becoming an economic necessity but where day-care resources are still grossly insufficient, this bred resentment.
Too, something of the old double standard may have been at work. By Baird's account, it was her husband who was taking care of the matter. Would there have been such furor if exactly the same arrangements had been made by the wife of a male nominee for attorney general?
With illegal immigrants on everybody's mind, little attention was paid her overall record, which held out promise that she might have made an excellent attorney general.
The Justice Department, like much of the rest of the federal government, has been demoralized by 12 years of indifferent management of its nuts-and-bolts operations. To reverse that will take a strong, professional administrator - like Baird is reputed to be.
Her corporate background also might have provided a useful counterpoint to other influences in the Clinton administration. Baird's support for tort reform, for instance, would have been a plus.
Ironically, the same lack of political and ideological connections that could have helped Baird professionalize the department also contributed to her downfall. Neither an intimate of the president nor a favorite of organized lobbies, she had few allies in the defense of her embattled nomination.
Clinton's task now is to find someone with comparable qualifications, but one whose imperfections are less offensive to the general public.