Don’t Shed Any Tears Over Linda Chavez

The question was never if Linda Chavez would actually become secretary of Labor in President-elect George W. Bush’s Cabinet, but how long it would be before something she had written, said or done in the past would bring her nomination down in flames.

Two days was faster than even I had expected. But that only proves what a bad idea Chavez’s nomination was from the moment the right-wing commentator was suggested for a serious job in the new administration.

Chavez withdrew her name from consideration after it was revealed that in the early 1990s she had allowed an illegal immigrant from Guatemala to live in her home and that, during the vetting process for her nomination, she had not been forthcoming with the FBI about the details. In the political shorthand of Washington, she had a “Zoe Baird problem,” so-called after the woman President Clinton failed to get as his first attorney general after her employment of illegal immigrant domestics generated a similar controversy.

Chavez said she didn’t want to be a “distraction” to Bush as he moves into the White House. But it’s not like she really had all that much to offer beyond being a Spanish-surnamed female who added a bit more gloss to the incoming administration’s veneer of ethnic diversity. Truth be told, other women Bush has nominated, like New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman for the Environmental Protection Agency and former California Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman for the Agriculture Department, are much more qualified and accomplished than Chavez.

Except for stints in government service as a congressional staffer and, later, as head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under President Reagan, Chavez’s career has been spent as a member of the so-called chattering class. She writes books and columns out of a series of right-leaning ivory towers inside the Beltway, venturing out long enough to provide a reliably conservative talking head for cable TV talk shows. Her fame is as the professional “anti-Latino” for a variety of right-wing lobbying groups and think tanks.

In contrast, the Mexican American friend Bush named his White House counsel, Texas Supreme Court Justice Alberto R. Gonzales, and the Florida Cuban American he nominated to be his Housing and Urban Development secretary, Mel Martinez, have far more legitimate claims to being genuine Latino leaders. For one thing, both won elections to public office before Bush singled them out for top jobs on his team.

Chavez lost the only election she ever ran in, despite an all-out Republican Party effort in 1986 to elect her to a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland, where she lived at the time. The 53-year-old New Mexico native now lives on the other side of the Potomac River, in Virginia. Which only reinforces my view that Chavez epitomizes a breed of professional “Hispanics”--I call them Beltway Bandidos.

There aren’t that many of them, but like Chavez, who first moved to Washington in the 1970s, they find the heady atmosphere of the nation’s capitol more edifying (not to mention profitable) than working in the trenches of this nation’s far-flung barrios and colonias.

Most of the Beltway Bandidos are political liberals. But even that worked to the advantage of someone as patently ambitious as Chavez, who spurned her roots in the Democratic Party to become one of the political right’s most reliable mouthpieces. She lent her Spanish surname to groups that oppose bilingual education, affirmative action, minimum wage laws and other issues promoted by mainstream Latino civil rights groups.

Being a knee-jerk contrarian is simple when you spend most of your career in the unreal hot-house that is official Washington. It is easier to dismiss the minimum wage as a “Marxist” idea, as Chavez once did, when you don’t come into daily contact with the millions of Latinos and other working poor for whom a minimum wage increase can mean the difference between sleeping on a bed or the floor.

Which is not to say that it’s wrong to challenge the sometimes rigid and uncreative agendas of some mainstream Latino groups. Some very thoughtful Latinos do. Essayist Richard Rodriguez and the late Dallas Morning News columnist Richard Estrada come to mind. But Rodriguez is an independent thinker--as Estrada was in his time--capable of staking out positions on any given issue that are as unpredictable as they are provocative. The political right does not like unpredictability, and that has never been a problem with Chavez.

Which is why her conservative sponsors will surely find a cozy place for her to land now that her career arc toward Washington’s center of power has been so rudely interrupted. Chavez will land on her feet--leaning, no doubt, to the right.

As for Bush, in the future he needs to look for his Latino appointees as far outside the incestuous little world of Washington as he can. There are plenty of Latino leaders in business, education, law enforcement and other fields who are capable, conservative and far better equipped than Chavez was. Whether they come from his home state of Texas, from California or another state, they’re sure to be more pragmatic--and need I add more effective--than another Beltway Bandido.