Bush Picks New Labor Nominee, Trade Chief

President-elect George W. Bush completed the selection of his Cabinet on Thursday, naming a Taiwanese immigrant to be Labor secretary and a key policy advisor in the previous Bush administration as the nation’s trade negotiator.

Bush chose Elaine Chao--former head of the Peace Corps, a deputy Transportation secretary a decade ago and the wife of a Republican senator--to lead the Labor Department. He first had offered the job to Linda Chavez, who withdrew this week.

He named Robert B. Zoellick, a veteran of top-level posts at the State Department, Treasury and White House during the previous two Republican administrations, to be the U.S. trade representative, saying that the job would remain a Cabinet-level post.

With his announcement Thursday afternoon at his transition headquarters two blocks from the White House, Bush has assigned half the Cabinet-level positions to white men. The most diverse Cabinet in history will, if confirmed by the Senate, include four women, two blacks, one Latino, two Asian Americans and one Arab American.

With Senate confirmation hearings scheduled next week on one of the most controversial of his appointments, Bush defended Interior secretary nominee Gale A. Norton.

Noting that environmentalists have criticized Norton’s appointment because she advocates oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Bush said:

“Well, guess who else thinks we ought to, in order to make sure we’ve got enough energy for the nation? The president-elect! It shouldn’t surprise people that I’ve picked people who share a philosophy with me.

“You know what happens in this town is the voices of the special interests like to tear people down. That’s just part of the process. I understand that,” he said with some irritation.

Bush’s job offer to Chao, who is married to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, represented an effort to overcome quickly the squall that engulfed his nomination of Chavez.

Chavez withdrew Tuesday in the wake of the disclosure that she had allowed a woman who was an illegal immigrant from Guatemala to live in her home for more than a year.

Chao, 47, arrived in the United States from Taiwan on a freighter when she was 8 years old, knowing no English. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received a master’s in business administration from Harvard University. After leaving the George Bush administration, she spent four years as president and chief executive officer of the United Way of America.

“Her successful life gives eloquent testimony to the virtues of hard work and perseverance, and to the unending promise of this great country,” Bush said, reading from notes.

Chao has a long history of work in senior government positions and, even if controversy were to develop around her nomination, senators may be reluctant to mount a vigorous challenge to the nomination of the wife of a colleague.

Bush presented the issues facing Chao: “Job training for those left behind in our new economy,” job skills for those leaving welfare and making sure that disability does not bar anyone from the workplace.

“These will be the priorities of the Department of Labor and of the new secretary,” Bush said.

In a statement, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney noted Chao’s resume, saying that she “has worked with the labor movement and has experience in government, in the private sector and in public service.”

In a light moment after she finished speaking, with Zoellick, Bush and Vice President-elect Dick Cheney at her side, she said to the president-elect: “Don’t I get a kiss?” He demurred, but offered her a hug.

Zoellick, 47, will be Bush’s chief trade policy advisor. The attention Bush devoted to the post, and his assurance that it will have Cabinet status, countered concern that his longtime friend Don Evans would eclipse the trade negotiator as Commerce secretary.

During the first Bush administration, Zoellick was undersecretary of State for economic and agricultural affairs, working on the North American Free Trade Agreement and the pact that led to the creation of the World Trade Organization. He left the State Department during the 1992 presidential campaign to help run Bush’s struggling White House as a deputy chief of staff.

During the Reagan administration, he was a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury. He graduated from Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School and received a master’s degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Bush linked “a confident, assertive trade policy” to efforts to achieve economic success.

“We will open new markets for products grown and made in America. That will be one of our foremost goals. We will ensure that trade agreements are enforced and that American farmers and workers and entrepreneurs are treated fairly.”

Reflecting the angry disputes over trade that have erupted in the United States in recent years, Zoellick said that he would listen “to consumers, to workers, to businesspeople, to farmers and others, to try to help them benefit and adjust to the openness in competition.”

In response to a question, Bush said that he chose to keep the trade job at the same Cabinet-level status it has occupied during the Clinton years to demonstrate the importance of trade in the global economy.

“I’ll be in touch with Bob a lot to find out how negotiations go,” Bush said, adding that he did not want to see agriculture “traded out in the end.”

Lori Wallach, director of the Public Citizens Global Trade Watch organization and a critic of free-trade policies under both Republicans and Democrats, said that Zoellick will face complaints from industry and financial companies struggling with trade agreements that he helped put in place in previous government service.

Although the NAFTA and world trade pacts were completed at the start of the Clinton administration, Zoellick will be forced to wrestle with the next steps--extending the U.S., Mexico and Canada free-trade agreement to the entire Western Hemisphere, with talks scheduled at a hemispheric summit in Quebec in April--and disputes with Europe over trade in bananas, beef and aircraft.

“If he or anyone thinks they can ignore these issues, that would be incorrect,” said Ira Shapiro, a deputy trade representative in the Clinton administration.

Praising Zoellick, Shapiro said, “If there’s ever any question about the place at the table of the U.S. trade representative, there won’t be with Bob there.”