PERSPECTIVES ON ZOE BAIRD : To Main Street, It’s a Crime : Judiciary Committee, transition team and the nominee herself still don’t get it: Nobody is above the law.

From the moment I raised Zoe Baird’s name on my radio talk show last week, I knew that my Washington friends were wrong. My calls from the real America were overwhelmingly against Baird. That she and her law-professor husband had decided to hire illegal workers to watch their child and tend to household chores was a very big deal indeed, no matter how much the Beltway said otherwise. Here was a crime, unlike lying to Congress, that Main Street could relate to. Store owners, working moms and dads, legal and illegal workers, I got calls from all of them, across the political and economic spectra, demanding that the nation’s top cop not be guilty of a crime they knew better than to commit.

Baird’s offense, callers said, was avoidable by a woman making half a million dollars a year in a state going through a crippling and pervasive recession. How could she not find an out-of-work Connecticut couple to do the job? How could she not know that what she did was against the very law that many entrepreneurs would love to break but don’t dare for fear of yet one more bureaucratic and legal impediment to staying above water in a business environment increasingly geared against them? And, how, they kept demanding, could Baird run the Justice Department, the very department responsible for enforcing immigration law, given her transgression?

What really annoys me and some of my listeners about this sorry episode is that the new President doesn’t need this. In voting for Clinton, I voted for someone I liked for the first time in my 40-something years. He doesn’t need an attorney general who cuts him off at the outset from the very people who elected him. And as someone who has watched with great interest and written about women moving into the corridors of power in government, business and the media, I don’t want the first female attorney general to be less than perfect. I know we’ve not always applied the toughest standards to Cabinet appointees or others in public service, but that’s hardly an excuse for looking the other way on the Baird nomination.

And what kind of advice and consent could Baird’s supporters in the Senate and on the transition team possibly have provided? Did they really think that her crime would be no problem in an election year driven by anger against isolated politicians and power brokers? That she would not be seen as somehow claiming to be above the law, better than the average Jane? Did they persuade her that the public would go for a lawbreaker as attorney general, or only that the Senate wouldn’t mind?

This is essentially the same Judiciary Committee that embarrassed itself and us by failing to realize the potency and resonance of Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. They were out of touch then and they are out of touch now. In the real America, Baird, despite her many qualifications for high office, is the wrong choice.Baird should do herself and our new President a favor and withdraw her name.