The Politics of Ambition : Baird: Now It’s no More Business As Usual

BEFORE WE discuss this business about former Atty. Gen.-designate Zoe Baird, let’s empty our moral pockets and get all the conflicts of interest out on the table. During the Reagan years, my husband, an attorney, represented White House aide Edward Meese III when Meese was named attorney general and had to answer questions from an independent counsel about his ethical fitness for the job. Meese survived, but not before being pummeled with literally dozens of accusations and charges. Democrats said they were merely enforcing the high standards we should demand from public officials. Pro-Meese stalwarts muttered that some day this moral zeal would boomerang and catch the Democrats in the back of the neck.

So Baird’s withdrawal of her name from consideration might seem like an occasion for grim satisfaction. But it is not, because the political climate that killed her nomination remains a continuing problem for the rest of us.

Even if only for prudential reasons, Clinton should not have picked Baird. The attorney general is the executive-branch official who most embodies the concept of law-abidingness. Giving the job to an admitted lawbreaker is an idea that has trouble written all over it in letters of six-foot-high multicolored neon.

And trouble is what ensued. That the Clinton team did not foresee this when Baird told them her story may have been due to their terminal weariness with the drawn-out, bean-counting process that preceded her selection. Also, she must have seemed safe because of the high quality of her sponsors, Warren Christopher and Lloyd N. Cutler, who are known for rectitude and good judgment.

Clinton certainly had his own reasons for believing that private sins do not necessarily incapacitate a man or woman for public service. “Look, I hung in there. You can, too,” Clinton reportedly told Baird, the day before he pulled the plug on her nomination.

That Baird did not see the danger is less understandable. After all, by the time she was named attorney general, she had been networking for years in preparation for just such a moment. Her obliviousness reminds me of the button my 11-year-old daughter wears, “I forget. What planet are you from?”

But as we sift through the ashes, let us note that the attack on Baird was fueled by personal, ideological and special-interest politics. The woman Baird bumped at the last minute from the attorney general job was a women’s movement activist with many friends. Baird’s favorable view of tort reform annoyed Clinton’s trial-lawyer supporters. She had worked for two large corporations and advocated watering down whistle-blower laws, so Ralph Nader did not like her.

In her early congressional testimony, Democrats hammered away at her while Republicans defended her. This anomaly alone should make us suspicious of Baird critics who say their motives were pure. Her nomination failed not because of a Republican onslaught but because her fellow Democrats chose to leave her alone on the battlefield.

Then there is what a previous generation delicately called the problem of help. Once the Baird issue became prominent, the phone calls to Senate offices started--and went heavily against Baird. They probably split along lines of class, as in the Anita F. Hill incident. Women who do not make much money, and who have to schlep both their child and a large chunk of their income to the day-care center, see no reason why a a rich woman like Baird, who can buy expensive child care, should be exempt from the law.

For their part, women with higher earnings have answers: The child-care market is chaotic at all levels. Hiring a caregiver often has to be done in a hurry. Critical information is hard to obtain. The downside risk (e.g., the pleasant young woman you hired turns out to be a pedophilic homicidal pyromaniac) is bottomless. Under such circumstances, anyone can find herself acting out of anxiety rather than principle or calculation.

Such talk garners no sympathy, because the child-care issue--like other baby-boom moral issues from Vietnam to marijuana--stirs divisive feelings about fairness, privilege and duty in this society. Those resentments can be dangerous. That is why we have pretty much decided that in most drug or draft cases, aspirants to public office should be allowed to apologize and get on with it. It is not unreasonable to think that Baird should have gotten this kind of chance.

But it is hard to get an apology accepted these days, not only for Baird but for the whole Clinton transition. Commentators have expressed shock at the discovery that both Special Trade Representative-to-be Mickey Kantor and Secretary of Commerce-designate Ronald H. Brown are wheeler-dealers. Journalists have reported as big news the fact that corporations, as in the past, bankrolled a good part of Clinton’s inaugural festivities.

A TV newsman reporting this admitted none of it seemed to be illegal. Yet that was not the end of it. “Bill Clinton promised,” said the journalist, “that it wouldn’t be business-as-usual. But it is.”

This sense of aggrieved disappointment is Clinton’s own fault. He ran a two-pronged campaign against George Bush. The first was the old-style liberalism that promised a better economic deal for more Americans. But Clinton also embraced the more highly moralistic liberalism that Democrats have increasingly relied on since Watergate. This newer liberalism paints Democrats as better than Republicans, because Democrats have superior personal moral rectitude.

During the campaign spoke of himself as the antithesis of the sleaze suffusing the Reagan-Bush years and said he would drive the special interests out of their pre-eminent position in Washington. He promised tighter ethics rules and campaign reforms. His inauguration celebrations displayed such a distinctive combination of piety and pop culture that humorist Fran Lebowitz said she felt she was present at the birth of the Religious Left.

But, in reality, Clinton cannot govern without special interests. He certainly could not find a group of presidential appointees free of the sins he has excoriated and capitalized on. Indeed, at the end of the day it turns out that his Cabinet is as elite a group as in the past and that they made out like bandits during that decade of selfishness, the 1980s.

The new President has two choices. He can keep dispensing his language of purity and see this rhetoric repeatedly used as a weapon to wound his Administration, as it wounded Jimmy Carter’s. Or he can begin negotiating a decline in the level of sanctimony to which we were treated during his campaign. If Clinton does make this start, some critics will call him a sellout. On the other hand, he might find it easier to get something done for the rest of us.