Let’s Examine the Waldholtz Family Values : A fervent backer of the new Gingrichian order blames hubby for their financial quagmire.

Just when I thought only Democrats and welfare mothers have family problems, along comes Republican Rep. Enid Greene Waldholtz of Utah to remind one of the universality of human travail. Despite the most public of commitments to “family values,” she was, by her account, deceived by the former executive director of the Utah Republican Party into a tissue-of-lies marriage allegedly involving fraudulent campaign contributions and a massive check-kiting scheme.

Her husband, Joseph P. Waldholtz, who ran George Bush’s campaign in Pennsylvania when the couple first courted, was on the lam for six days last week avoiding an FBI investigation of the tangled Waldholtz finances. His own father suspects that this ex-treasurer of the Young Republicans may have stolen $600,000 from his ailing grandmother. Is nothing sacred?

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer couple. The Waldholtzes had offered themselves up as prototypes of the new morality of the Gingrich revolution. Indeed, it was their baby, Elizabeth, whom Gingrich cradled as proof of his commitment to children on the first anniversary of the “Contract With America.” Waldholtz co-sponsored nine of the contract’s 10 provisions, and the Speaker appointed her to the powerful House Rules Committee, the first Republican freshman in 80 years to be so honored.

But final passage of the contract will come too late for Enid Waldholtz, who will soon be just another single mom. Last week, even before her fugitive husband turned himself in, Enid Waldholtz filed for divorce and sole custody of Elizabeth. She also wants her maiden name back. Maybe next she’ll join NOW.

True to the contract’s doctrine of individual moral responsibility, Rep. Waldholtz blamed her husband for all of the family’s troubles. I would have expected nothing less from a fervid docent of the Gingrich revolution.

How was the congresswoman to know that the $1.8 million of “personal money” that the couple used to turn the tide in the last month of her campaign came from funds not their own? She “fully believed”’ her husband when he told her about “our supposed joint ownership of property in Pennsylvania.” That evidently represents the $5 million in real-estate holdings that Joe allegedly swapped with her father for $4 million in ready cash. Perhaps theirs was a “traditional values” home in which the little woman doesn’t fill her silly head with financial data.

This plea of spousal ignorance will be a hard sell to the federal grand jury investigating the couple’s corrupted bookkeeping. Enid Greene Waldholtz had eight years of experience as a corporate attorney and two years as a top aide in the Utah governor’s office. She can read a financial statement.

She also knew the federal campaign finance laws inside out and had challenged her opponent’s “ethics” in taking PAC money from the pro-choice Emily’s List. That happens to be totally legal. But the law does not permit contributions of more that $1,000 from individuals, and that includes Waldholtz’s father. Nor was she blindsided by her husband’s sudden aberrant behavior, as she now insists. “For Enid to say she had no knowledge is disingenuous at best,” said Steve Taggert, her former press secretary. “She was warned there was a substantial problem.”

On Aug. 7, 1994, the Salt Lake Tribune reported: “Her campaign went through a series of personnel changes earlier this summer, following reports of personal debt and campaign-accounting problems involving Waldholtz’s husband and campaign adviser, Joe Waldholtz. The Republican candidate now insists the problems were exaggerated by the media and had no effect on the campaign.”

It was after that date that husband Waldholtz came up with $1.8 million of fresh money to throw into the campaign. Enid Waldholtz won by spending more than twice as much of her own personal money per vote than Senate hopeful Michael Huffington did in California. “It’s my money, my husband’s and mine,” Waldholtz proclaimed a week before the election. For months, she’d known that he couldn’t pay his $60,000 American Express and jeweler’s bills, so how in the world did she figure he had millions to put into her campaign? If the candidate didn’t know the truth, it’s because she didn’t want to know.

What makes these new zealots of the right so insufferable is their scrub-faced presumption that they wrote the book on virtue. They make it sound so easy: family values, ethical behavior, individual responsibility. Just read the contract. But life’s not like that. In the real world, Gingrich walks out on a wife with cancer and his protegee Waldholtz uses highly questionable money to buy an election.