Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 1, 1993 TAG: 9302010234
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A LESSON LEARNED?
THE RECEIVED wisdom is that the botched effort to install Zoe Baird as attorney general will fade fast from public memory.It is, after all, early days in the new administration; public opinion worked its will in quashing the nomination, President Clinton apologized for making it, and new disputes have come center stage.
The important question, though, is whether the Clinton team has grasped the breadth of the ineptitude it demonstrated in trying to install as the nation's chief law enforcer a person who herself was breaking the law - which fact she'd revealed from the outset to those who selected her and to others who would judge her nomination.
The probable answer is no.
The Clintonians have not learned.
They're not operating as promised to bring forth a middle-of-the-road party. They are caught up in quotas - looking more to gender than to qualifications - and in pretense that pledges to minorities are more sacred than promises to majorities. Forget the middle-class tax cut, but stake all on rushing to fight for homosexual equality in the military.
Baird, to be sure, is able, talented and gracious, and was forthright about her illegal hiring of aliens for child-care and household purposes.
Had she been a man, some suggest, she would have been confirmed. Not so, though; had she been a man she would not have been appointed.
Clinton, by all accounts, had ticketed the attorney general's post for a woman: Finding others unsuitable, he settled hastily on choosing for the people's attorney the general counsel of a huge insurance company with scant reputation on public-policy questions and no experience in criminal law.
Clinton, to be sure, promised "diversity" in his appointments, but quotas are not required to achieve that. The president shrank the available talent pool, apparently trying to appease single-interest factions - the kind of McGovernite thinking that incapacitated the party until Jimmy Carter and Clinton won out over crippled opponents.
As a plurality president, Clinton needs all the distinction in appointments he can get and more than he has gotten. He also needs to retain his campaign image as a moderate with a sensitive finger on the pulse of Main Street America whence came, unsurprisingly, the veto of Baird and, now, a shout against homosexuals in the military.
Here's guessing the on-the-bus-again candidate would not have cited Baird as an example of a prime Cabinet choice. Regarding education, ability, income and lifestyle, she is an elitist while he, professedly, is a populist.
One wonders if Clinton could not have fielded a stronger team by calling more of the nation's governors to his service.
It is all very puzzling - the onset of the Clinton years. A centerpiece of his campaign - a middle-class tax cut - disappears. Clinton embraces George Bush's "cruel" policy toward Haitian immigration. The consummate politician is burned by an amateurish nomination for a top Cabinet post.
And on the heels of that fiasco, the president moves to the front burner his confrontation with the top brass over the place and status of gays and lesbians in the military. The economy, the overriding campaign issue, is shoved down the line. The "laser beam" may be burning, but you can't see it.
This may be the beginning of a new political symphony (Clinton is well shed of his tax-cut and immigration positions), but one doubts that it is playing well in Peoria.
Yes, it's axiomatic that new presidents can profit long-term by taking short-term losses early, accidentally or purposefully. But there's a negative side. A stumbling beginning muddies the president's image and calls his leadership strength into question.
Who is Bill Clinton? That question ultimately will be decided by the interplays between him and events. But at the beginning he may be seen less as the moderate reformer of his party and more as the moderate being reformed by his party's single-interest factions.
\ AUTHOR Perry Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star in Norfolk.