The Victims of a Double Standard and a Double Bind

Few people have expressed the extraordinary double standard faced by men and women in the Clinton Administration quite as well or as pompously as Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich did Sunday on “Face the Nation.”

Asked whether he had ever hired an illegal immigrant, he replied that to his knowledge, he had not. “But again,” he added, “I’m not here to talk about baby-sitters. I’m here to talk about the economy.”

Reich wasn’t the only Administration official trying to downplay the controversy.

“Well, people here in Washington seem to be talking about it, (but) I don’t believe that people in the rest of the country are paying much attention to Kimba Wood,” said White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers on Monday. “I don’t think that’s . . . high on their radar screen.”

Myers should get out more often. It seems to me that the rest of the nation has had nothing but Kimba Wood, Zoe Baird and how working parents cope on its radar screen. How could we have avoided it? The topic has been on the front page for days. It leads the network news.

And it has been virtually the sole subject of conversation among the mothers and fathers in my neighborhood for the past two weeks.

For most families, the issues raised by this debacle hit home. They are something we want to talk about. We want to share stories about who takes care of our children, about whether we navigate the maze of paperwork involved in paying employment taxes. We want to shake our heads as we muse that no one-- no one! --we know pays taxes for cleaning ladies, carpenters, house painters, occasional baby-sitters or gardeners. (We are, it seems, a nation of well-heeled scofflaws--barely a quarter of the estimated 2 million who should pay taxes for household help do.)

And we want to ask each other why this issue has never been raised before with a male nominee.

In the last month, reality and the law have collided around the issues unleashed by Zoe Baird’s admission that she employed an undocumented worker as a nanny and failed to pay taxes. Like most issues relating to child care, the whole mess probably would have fallen off society’s radar screen had federal Judge Kimba Wood not been knocked out of contention for attorney general. Wood once employed an undocumented worker as a nanny when it was legal to do so, and paid the appropriate taxes. She obeyed the law, but did not “admit” it.

So Wood became the victim of a double standard and a double bind.

(Why the White House assumes Americans are too dumb to distinguish between obeying the law and breaking it is hard to understand. Bill Clinton gave Americans a whole lot more credit than that during the campaign.)

Now starts the procession of confessions: Secretary of Commerce Ronald H. Brown admits he never paid his cleaning lady’s Social Security taxes. Ditto potential attorney general nominee Charles Ruff, whose name was promptly crossed off the list. Are you now or have you ever been the employer of a worker for whom you have not paid taxes?

So far, the message we get from the Wood and Brown cases is this: Working mothers who haven’t broken any laws may not be nominated to top Administration posts, and male Cabinet secretaries who admit breaking the law may keep their jobs. (Face it, these guys probably have families to feed.)

White House officials have tripped over themselves to lay blame for this fiasco on Judge Wood, because she answered no when asked repeatedly if she had a “Zoe Baird problem.”

Kimba Wood doesn’t have a “Zoe Baird problem.”

Kimba Wood has a “Bill Clinton problem.”

A Bill Clinton problem is what you have when you are sacrificed for imagined political expediency.

A Bill Clinton problem is what you have when the President signs the Family Leave Act with one hand and crosses a law-abiding working mom off his short list for attorney general with the other.

When the candidate promised to make his Cabinet “look like America,” we believed him.

Maybe we put too much faith in what he said he would do. Maybe we had too much hope that a man like him married to a woman like her would do right by American women. Maybe we forgot about the tendency of those in power to make others pay for their mistakes.

The Cabinet may look like America, but it’s America from one of its worst angles: the America that considers running a household to be a woman’s responsibility. The America that punishes its working mothers by refusing to make affordable, safe child care available to all.

And the America that believes women are qualified for the jobs men have always held, as long as the dishes get done and the baby is put to bed by eight.