The Lessons Of Nannygate

Poor Zoe Baird. Her name has already entered the language as a synonym for trouble. Along with “the Gary Hart syndrome,” signifying compulsive womanizing, we now have “the Zoe Baird problem,” meaning child-care infractions. Its chief usage is in the accusative: “Do you have a Zoe Baird problem?” That was the question that brought down Kimba Wood as a candidate for Attorney General (even though her answer was “No”). It was also the question that helped pluck the childless and unmarried Janet Reno from relative obscurity to become the President’s nominee for the job. No kids, no nanny, no Zoe Baird problem. Reno, 54, who appears to be well qualified for the post, doesn’t even have an immigrant gardener: she mows her own lawn.

But the domestic tribulations of most working women, and for that matter working men, are more like Baird’s than Reno’s. Two-thirds of American women with school-age children are in the labor force and require some sort of day- care arrangement. Nearly 60% of married men with kids have working wives. In the absence of the kind of subsidized day-care systems that exist in many European countries, most American families have become participants in an underground economy. For the wealthy, that may mean employing a live-in nanny, but not withholding taxes or asking to see a green card. For the less well- off, it may come down to paying a teenager to baby-sit in the afternoons or slipping cash to a neighbor who watches the kids. Anyone lucky enough to have found someone caring, trustworthy and affordable is not going to let a few tax laws wreck the arrangement that makes family life possible.

Last week the air was thick with confessions from such workers. “Do you have a Zoe Baird problem?” they asked one another. “Sure,” said many, who had never thought to discuss the matter before. Fortunately, few of the confessors were inclined to seek a post with the Clinton Administration.

They had better not. After the President’s political advisers determined that Americans are too dumb to understand the difference between Zoe Baird, who knowingly violated the law by employing two illegal aliens and paying them off the books, and Kimba Wood, who legally employed an alien and filed all the required taxes, they discovered that — oops! — they had inadvertently created a new hiring policy. Worse, its effect looked suspiciously like sex discrimination. So, compounding the error, the Administration decided to formalize its accidental policy and apply it to men as well as women. Henceforth, the Administration announced, all candidates for the hundreds of government jobs subject to Senate confirmation must pass the Zoe Baird litmus test.

The irony is that the first dual-career parents ever to occupy the White House have created a policy that discriminates against folks like themselves, not to mention single parents. Surely they must know this. As two politically ambitious attorneys, the Clintons have always made sure that Chelsea’s baby- sitting arrangements were strictly by the book. But among the legions of high-powered Friends of Bill and Friends of Hillary, there are undoubtedly dozens who have been less scrupulous. Recent Census Bureau and IRS data suggest that only 1 in 4 people who employ household help bothers to pay Social Security taxes. Given the natural reluctance to confide in government agents, the real figure is probably much lower.

By instituting the Zoe Baird standard, Clinton has tilted the pool of potential appointees away from working parents toward the single, the childless, those with grown kids and even, God forbid, the millionaire types with stay-at-home wives who have dominated government for eons. (Sure, some of these folks could be vulnerable because they’ve employed maids and gardeners without paying taxes. But, provided such workers are not illegal aliens, an employer can argue that they are “independent contractors” responsible for their own paperwork.) The Cabinet is already shaping up to reflect this bias, at least where women are concerned. Of Clinton’s top female appointees, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala and now Reno are unmarried and have no children; Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary and U.N. Representative Madeleine Albright have grown kids; only EPA chief Carol Browner has to worry about child care. So much for the President’s vaunted vow to create a government “that looks like America.”

Maybe it’s time for the President to stage one of those New Age, public- confessional scenes that lofted him through so many rough spots during the campaign. If he could admit to trying marijuana and having marital problems, why not admit that the nanny litmus test is a mistake? He could bring on the cameras, sit in front of a glowing hearth in the White House family quarters and pensively bite his lower lip. “As working parents,” one can imagine him saying, “Hillary and I understand the anguish of searching for quality day care for children.” He could insert some touching anecdote about the time Hillary and he were on the road, Chelsea had the chicken pox and the baby- sitter failed to show. He might also mention that the lack of reliable, affordable child care is the single biggest obstacle to getting poor women off welfare and into jobs. The arduous search for a woman Attorney General, he would then admit, has only underscored the nation’s child-care woes, which affect the privileged as well as the poor. Then an announcement: in an attempt to address the problem, the President would order a major re-evaluation of the tax and immigration laws governing domestic workers and a new effort to create affordable child care for the poor. It would be good political theater. It would be popular. And it would be right.