Judge Kimba Wood: She's No Zoe

A mid the miscalculations, late reactions and overreactions surrounding the search for an ethically pure attorney general, we seem to have forgotten something: Kimba Wood is no Zoe Baird.

We might be forgiven for this oversight, especially in view of headlines like the one in the New York Daily News, which screamed, "ALIENS 2!" But let's not make the mistake of lumping together these two fallen attorney general candidates. They have little in common beyond their gender and their rather unusual names.

Baird blatantly violated the law, first by hiring two illegal aliens to do garden work and child care, and then by failing (until recently) to pay Social Security taxes for them.

But Wood, who until late Friday was assured of the nomination to head the Justice Department, meticulously obeyed the law. In March 1986, when it was legal to do so, she hired a babysitter whose visa had expired. She filed all required forms and paid all required taxes, in full compliance with the law.

When Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in the fall of 1986, making the hiring of illegal aliens unlawful, a grandfather clause specifically exempted employment that began prior to the law's enactment.

In a written statement, Wood claims to have meticulously maintained records of her babysitter's status in this country from 1980 until she obtained legal residency in 1987. She kept records of federal Social Security and W-2 filings, state unemployment compensation, disability insurance and workers compensation payments, as well as the babysitters' applications for labor certification and legal residency.

Baird ludicrously blamed her transgressions on bad legal advice. Ignorance of the law was a lousy excuse for someone who would be America's top lawyer (and whose husband is a constitutional law professor).

But Wood made no excuses. Instead, she demonstrated her careful and complete compliance with the law. Her obvious understanding of the law and her meticulous obedience to it are qualities we should admire in a potential attorney general.

Unfortunately, Wood will not be rewarded for her efforts, and the Justice Department will be denied the benefit of her legal precision. Her nomination died before it was born because President Bill Clinton is hovering under the political cloud of the "Zoe Baird phenomenon."

When Baird's problems became public, Washington was deluged by phone calls in democracy's latest undemocratic innovation, whereby senators count the lights on the Capitol switchboard to take the nation's pulse (no one has yet though to calculate the margin of error of this sophisticated new opinion polling technique).

Calls ran overwhelmingly against Baird's confirmation and a new ethical standard was born. Though Wood had carefully followed the law, even the appearance of impropriety kept her from the job.

The White House announced Monday that this new standard will also affect nominees for 1,100 positions in the Clinton Administration. That this decision was based on political expediency is clear from two facts. First, the standard applies only to appointees requiring Senate approval. Anyone Clinton can hire without oversight will not be asked about a "Zoe Baird problem."

Second, the standard apparently will not apply to officials who have already slipped through the Senate confirmation process. Despite Ron Brown's admission that he failed to pay taxes for a part-time maid, Administration officials insist that the commerce secretary will keep his job.

But the decision to reject anyone who is guilty (or appears guilty) or improper employment practices is more than political expediency. It is also a ridiculously unrealistic overreaction to Baird's failure.

Census Bureau figures indicate that about 75 percent of the two million households with domestic workers fail to pay the required taxes, according to an Internal Revenue Service spokesperson quoted in The New York Times. And while "everyone's doing it" is no excuse, consider the pettiness of this stringent new ethical standard: anyone who has paid someone (a babysitter, for example) more than $50 over the course of three months is required to pay taxes for that person. The number of people who have violated this law is probably incalculable.

Already a third potential attorney general nomination--that of Charles Ruff--has been derailed by revelations that the prospective nominee failed to pay Social Security taxes for his maid. And we have yet to see whether a "Maid-gate" scandal will end Brown's tenure prematurely after his corporate connections failed to do so.

Hopefully, these so called scandals will be no more damaging than youthful marijuana smoking. After Douglas Ginsberg's nomination to the Supreme Court was withdrawn because he had smoked pot years earlier, a host of public figures admitted to one-time marijuana experimentation. Senator Al Gore '69 was among them, and his ascendancy to the vice presidency (as well as non-inhaler Clinton's election) is proof that the scandal has lost its potency.

Clinton's mistake has been to read public anger at Baird's actions as a sign that no one with employee-related problems is eligible for public office. Baird's case was a unique one: her lame attempts to align herself with working mothers by bemoaning the difficulty of finding good child care fell on deaf ears when it was revealed that she and her husband make over $600,000 a year and were paying their nanny less than six dollars an hour.

The onslaught of phone calls condemning Zoe Baird was motivated by resentment at her elitist arrogance. Baird's nomination failed because she represented a quality the voters had begun to detest in George Bush: a disconnection from the very real struggles of Americans who lack six- or seven-figure incomes. After a year of campaign foreplay with the "forgotten middle class," Clinton failed to deliver, leaving the middle class feeling frustrated and forgotten once more.

But this is not a license to reject law-abiding and respectable citizens like Kimba Wood. By many accounts, Wood could have been a fantastic attorney general. A Federal District Judge since 1988, she has a reputation for toughness that she earned by sentencing Michael Milken to 10 years in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to six counts of fraud.

Judges and attorneys alike have praised her legal skills, her graciousness and her ability to command the courtroom. And her five years spent presiding over criminal cases help alleviate concerns that she has no experience as a prosecutor.

Unfortunately, a spineless overreaction to the Baird fiasco prevented Clinton from nominating Wood. That decision is a political setback for Clinton's administration, an unfortunate loss for the country and a grievous injustice to Kimba Wood.