Clinton Pressed for 2nd Female Nominee : Cabinet: Women’s rights activists warn ‘honeymoon’ will be over if next attorney general selection is a man.

Women’s rights advocates lobbied heavily Friday for President Clinton to nominate another woman for attorney general, warning that choosing a man instead will “hasten the end of the honeymoon” with female supporters, who provided 56% of his voter support in the November election.

“I worry that the old-boys network now has an excuse to say, ‘We tried to put a woman in the (job) and it didn’t work, so now we can appoint one of us,’ ” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Fund for a Feminist Majority.

Women’s rights spokeswomen made their wishes known to the White House and appeared on radio and national television shows in their effort to influence Clinton.

“He should be politically savvy enough to know that appointing a woman as attorney general is important,” said Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women. “I think if he doesn’t, it will hasten the end of his honeymoon with women voters who put him in office.”

If a man is named to the post, women will hold four of 18 Cabinet-level positions under Clinton, who pledged during his campaign to make government “look like America” by putting more women and minorities in office, women’s rights advocates said. The Bush Administration had three female Cabinet-level officials when it left office Wednesday.

Voters expressed a preference for female officeholders in November by adding 24 women to the House and four to the Senate, women’s rights spokeswomen said.

“I’m not at all giving up on this,” said Harriet Woods of the Coalition for Women’s Appointments, an alliance of various political women’s groups. “It isn’t that we’re against men. We just think the best person for the job is a woman.”

Woods said her organization was resubmitting names from a list of female candidates that it had provided to the Clinton transition team. That list includes two prominent Washington attorneys, Jamie Gorelick and Brooksley E. Born.

The group also is gathering new names of attorneys it believes are qualified for the post, including State’s Atty. Janet Reno of Dade County, Fla., and Washington, D.C., Superior Court Judge Noel Kramer.

“The days are long past when a President can say with a straight face that there are not enough qualified women for the job,” Ireland said.

The female activists acknowledged that their groups were largely silent during the Baird confirmation battle, some because they felt Baird was more a representative of the corporate world than a women’s advocate. Another reason they showed little support for Baird, women’s activists said, is that the Clinton Administration seemed surprised by the public outcry against her and did not try to rally feminist groups to support her until the last minute.

“It’s not that women were not willing to testify on her behalf,” Woods said. “It’s just that there was no effort to organize it. I got a last-minute cry to send telegrams, but it was too late.”

While some women’s advocates said they believe the charges against Baird were fair, they questioned whether a man would be held to the same standards.

Smeal said the hearing showed that there remains “a lack of sympathy to working women to this day.”

“I cannot imagine a young father being asked the same questions,” she said, especially if he, like Baird, indicated that his spouse had made the decisions on day care.

“I think if it were a male nominee who had illegal immigrants working in his house, he would just say, ‘My wife takes care of child care,’ and with a wink and a nod off he would have gone to nomination,” Ireland said.

The senators as well as the public also seemed to expect Baird to be more honest than a man, Ireland said, because voters are looking to women to cleanse politics. One reason voters put more women than ever into national office, she said, is their disgust with the “old-boy” network that forgives and covers up corruption and lies.

When Baird’s nomination was announced, “there was so much enthusiasm about having a woman in that top post,” said Marcia Greenberger, president of the National Women’s Law Center. “I hope that Clinton does find a candidate who is a woman, because that excitement and enthusiasm is still here.”