Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 18, 1993 TAG: 9308260258
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
President Bill Clinton first floats, via White House leak, the name of this person or that whom he is said to have placed on his ``short list'' for an important appointment.
Then, after a week or so in which the presumptive nominee's personal history has been exhaustively - and exhaustingly - examined by the news media, another name, and perhaps then a third, is added to the ``short list,'' which by now has grown longer.
Finally, having exposed two or three candidates to more scrutiny than they like, he names an altogether different person as his nominee.
It began in February, of course, with Zoe Baird, a rich corporate lawyer whom Clinton actually made his official nominee for the post of attorney general.
When Baird's history of having failed to pay Social Security taxes on a couple of illegal aliens whom she employed as domestics - though she could not pay Social Security taxes on them anyway, since, being illegal, they had no Social Security status - the public and the Senate Judiciary Committee arose in righteous wrath.
Whereupon Clinton withdrew her nomination.
Then it became Kimba Wood's turn; and she, too, was pulled when it appeared she had a similar history.
Janet Reno, a Florida prosecutor, finally got the nomination and proved to be confirmable.
Then, only this month, the pattern re-emerged twice: first with Lani Guinier, whom he pulled as his nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights, then with his choice for the opening on the United States Supreme Court created by the retirement of Justice Byron White.
First the White House loudly boomed the nearly certain nomination of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.
When such worthies as Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Dole hinted mildly that they might have reservations about Babbitt's ``political'' character, Clinton then turned, very publicly, to a federal judge named Steven Breyer. When it was revealed that Breyer had failed to pay Social Security taxes on an 81-year-old domestic worker of whom he apparently believed no Social Security taxes were required, Clinton backed off again.
Finally, denying he had waffled, zigzagged or inhaled, he threw the nomination to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a federal appellate judge from Washington, D.C.
I mean in no way to depreciate Judge Ginsburg's appropriateness for the high court - for which, in fact, she seems extraordinarily well-suited - when I ask: What's wrong with Clinton?
As with Reno, he appears to have wound his curious way, in the end, to a superb appointment. But one cannot help wondering what his immensely public circuitousness means or forebodes.
Is Clinton indecisive? Is he so afraid of public criticism that he changes his mind, with great publicity, when he encounters even token opposition? Or is he simply messy, perhaps the victim of poor staff work?
Here I confess my hunch that his famous desire to please makes him willing to zig and zag until he finds what he wants that will work, or at least will pass a remarkably difficult Congress.
But the consequences are extreme: He appears irresolute. He appears cowardly. He appears - and I suspect is - indifferent to the public humiliation he brings down on men and women he is considering.
Worse still, perhaps, is what the pattern implies: that on matters of important national policy Clinton will compromise away his deepest convictions - and the plainest promises he made during his campaign - to keep Congress and the public happy.
This is not the behavior of a president who knows what he wants and is willing to sacrifice immediate popularity for what he considers the long-range good of the country.
\ Paxton Davis s a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
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