Two Down--What Next? : Does anyone here know how to play this game?

President Clinton didn’t owe the job of attorney general to U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood--the President is entitled to have whomever he wants for this central and sensitive position. But he owed Wood--and the nation--better than what he gave her last week.

Let’s start by praising Clinton’s effort, star-crossed as it is, to name the first female attorney general in history. But in dropping Wood, a respected jurist on New York’s federal bench, as if she were suddenly ethically radioactive, he demonstrated a failure of nerve. She had done nothing wrong but, fearing a Zoe Baird-like political storm, Clinton beat a retreat.

Wood, like Baird, Clinton’s first failed nominee, had once employed an undocumented worker as a baby-sitter. But there were significant differences between Wood and Baird. Hiring undocumented aliens was not illegal when Wood retained the woman’s services, and once it became illegal, Wood began the process of legalizing the nanny’s immigration status. As far as anyone can tell, Wood observed the law.

Are we to conclude that henceforth every woman nominated for high public office--or at least a visible job at the Justice Department--must pass a special litmus test: Do you employ, or have you ever used, an illegal immigrant as a baby-sitter? Or perhaps the question is to be applied only to women? It now turns out that Ronald H. Brown, the new commerce secretary, had failed to pay Social Security taxes for a domestic worker. But the last time anyone looked the guy was still in the Cabinet.

This whole brouhaha over illegal-immigrant nannies would be laughable had it not already killed the chances of two otherwise qualified women to be attorney general. No, the problem was not Wood’s record, either as an employer or as a mother. It is the lack of willingness by the Clinton White House--and indeed the nation itself--to move forward in the face of public misunderstanding of the complex and emotional issue of illegal immigration.

Granted, it looked bad for Clinton to have nominated as attorney general, whose responsibilities include enforcing immigration laws, a person like Baird, who had knowingly violated those laws by employing two illegal immigrants. Even so, how do these two women stack up ethically against former male attorneys general like John Mitchell or Edwin Meese III? These are not tough standards to top.

One thing Clinton must learn from this mess is that he needs to get a better handle on immigration issues. In fact, once he has an attorney general in place, one of the top items on that person’s agenda must be to help Clinton better understand the whole phenomenon. This is a huge and difficult issue. His White House’s lack of understanding helped doom two potentially promising women. It would have been better to deal with them constructively instead of panicking in the face of a feared public reaction. Which is, unfortunately, what he appears to have done in Wood’s case.