Linda Chavez and Marijuana; More Drug-Law Nonsense; Kiss Me, Kate (Harris)
Neither of my parents had a Chesterfieldian obsession with good manners, but there was one piece of advice they drummed into my head pretty thoroughly by the time I was about four years old: Never make a big deal about how honest you are. Because whenever someone says, Frankly...or To tell the truth...or I'll be completely honest...you get the impression that such "honesty" involves breaking a long-established habit.
That's what happened to Linda Chavez, George W. Bush's nominee for labor secretary, who proved unable at her goodbye-cruel-world press conference to go 30 seconds without parading her probity, bragging about her achievements or exploding into self-pity. The revelations that Chavez had taken in the Guatemalan immigrant Marta "Libre" Mercado, given her money in exchange for doing odd jobs about the house, and failed to report the arrangement, on the grounds that she didn't think it constituted a work arrangement, would not themselves have killed her. Chavez lost her nomination in the final 48 hours before she withdrew it, and she lost because every time she opened her mouth, she lied.
This is almost a Washington setpiece. By the time she'd been the nominee for five minutes, Chavez, like so many of her predecessors, was treating the Cabinet slot as her personal property. Routine press scrutiny was tantamount to theft, to be met with unbounded outrage. Chavez's is not the worst example of such Bush-Cabinet megalomania?that honor goes to Colin Powell's absurd umbrage at press reports that he'd accepted six-figure speaking fees from a Lebanese politician tightly linked to Syrian intelligence.
But Chavez's was the most clumsy, and it seemed eerily dependent on what the meaning of the word "is" was. For most people, giving room and board and money to someone you don't know constitutes an employer-employee relationship, much as getting fellated by your intern constitutes sexual relations. There remained the possibility that Chavez was simply ignorant or deluded. But that possibility was removed once it was revealed she had dropped hints to her neighbor Margaret Zswisler not to discuss the Mercado matter with the FBI agents who were likely to interview her. Zswisler?oops!?turned out to be a partisan-Democrat ambulance chaser who's pals with Clinton attorney Neil Eggleston.
Chavez blamed her inability to tell the truth on the accelerated screening process made necessary by Al Gore's interminable demands for recounts in Florida. "I should know something about that," she said. "I've been vetted many times before. Normally what happens when you have someone under consideration, even after you have selected them, is that you go through a vetting procedure and it is done before that person's name is public." (In other words, if I'd only had an extra seven weeks, I could maybe have come up with an honest answer to your question.) But Chavez's account of the vetting process is, as she well knows, not true. There's almost never time to do a full-field FBI investigation before news of a nomination leaks to the press, so what happens is an interview in which the potential nominee alerts the administration to any potential problems. Chavez chose the path of trying to bamboozle even her bosses.
So Chavez was to blame for her own undoing, but she chose to blame something else. "The politics of personal destruction," she said, "is the phrase." Yeah, Bill Clinton's phrase?and it's worrisome that George W. Bush has made it such an integral part of his working vocabulary. In fact, as the first Cabinet face of a President-Elect who had promised to "restore dignity and honor to the White House," Chavez was letting the cat out of the bag that the Bush administration could be little more than a Republican Clinton administration. (That's why Bush was so irate that he has not called her since.)
Chavez was at her most Clintonesque when she glowered out at the assembled press and pouted, "All of you have made, I think, a great deal more of this story than need be..." What was lost in the whole scandal was that Chavez actually had a point here. Employing illegals may annoy certain voters?and "harboring" them in your house may give the federal government a convenient pretext for entering your house with machine guns, as it did in the Elian Gonzalez case. But immigrant labor is today a reality deeply imbedded in American life, particularly among the class to which the journalists who grilled Chavez belong. Just how deeply imbedded became clear in last Tuesday's Washington Post, where immigration lawyer Michael Maggio was quoted as saying: "The facts to be determined are very simple. Did Ms. Chavez have another maid? If she did, it would then seem credible that [Mercado] was a houseguest... If she doesn't have other domestic help, but has a Guatemalan woman in the home, doing domestic chores, it would seem she was a cleaning lady...who wasn't paid the minimum wage." Mercado told ABC that there was, in fact, no other housekeeper. But what's more significant is Maggio's mind-set: It has become not only unusual but literally inconceivable to the country's opinionmaking classes that an upper-middle-class professional woman like Chavez should be without domestic servants.
In other words, this had the makings of a Douglas Ginsburg transformation. When Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1987, remember, Judge Ginsburg revealed that he had tried pot as a professor at Harvard Law School. The press chanted, "Ooooh! Ooooh!" until Ginsburg was pressured into stepping down. But once he did, every American born since World War II realized that if trying pot were a disqualification for full citizenship, the country would find itself citizenless in short order. After all, a 1979 survey had shown that 55 million Americans had smoked the stuff. So reason prevailed. We now have a president who tried pot, and have just come out of an election between two candidates reported to have been not just dabblers in drugs but enthusiastic users.
The increasing difficulty of even finding nominees who don't have nanny problems is an indication that our laws are out of whack. Zoe Baird, forced to un-nominate herself for attorney general in 1993 on the same illegal-immigrant business, should have been the Douglas Ginsburg of the "nanny problem." And she could have been. Huffing pompously that Chavez "broke...the law" would not have derailed her nomination if she had been bold enough to tell the truth: that (a) immigration is a fact-on-the-ground that makes a mockery of the law; (b) without it, our economy would run into an inflationary spiral; and (c) "illegal" status creates?and is intended to create?a pool of laborers whose special vulnerabilities make them obtainable for cheap.
Then she could have claimed that Republicans were the party of people of every class who want to work. And she could have claimed hypocrisy, pointing to the assembled reporters and asking (through a show of hands) if any of them cleaned his own toilets or mowed his own lawn?let alone diapered his own children. In 99 out of 100 cases (and the same goes for the families of the senators who would have sat in judgment on Chavez), such tasks are carried out by green-cardless Paco and Pilar.
We can't leave the topic of marijuana without mentioning Cameron Reagan, grandson of the former president and son of the right-wing talk-show host Michael, who was sentenced to 90 days in drug rehab and "anger-management" for possessing less than an ounce of marijuana.
I can imagine he'd be angry. He hasn't done much of anything wrong, and yet he's somehow got his sleeve caught in the gnashing gears of the American criminal justice system. The problem is that Cameron R. (as he's surely being called right this minute) had violated probation for "receiving stolen property" from a car theft. He was also on probation at the time of his most recent arrest for scratching his name into a storefront window.
Oh, the threat to society! So why did the Reagans' lawyer describe the family as "grateful" that the boy had been forced to drop out of college to get addiction treatment for a nonaddictive drug? Because this coupla-joints'-worth probation violation carried with it stiff sentencing guidelines, and the judge, had he been so inclined, could have sent him to the state pen for three years. Somehow, it's the need to say thank you! thank you! to your persecutors that's most galling.
President Reagan was a good enough friend to freedom (and enough of a reprobate when younger) that I somehow don't think he envisioned this for his own grandson. It's funny: Back in 1985, Communism looked like an immovable menace, and yet it had disappeared from Europe by the end of the decade. Nancy Reagan's Just-Say-No campaign, meanwhile, looked like a passing insipidity. And yet it has turned into the foundation stone of the most...em...Cambodian aspects of American life.
In stepping forward as the first senator to formally oppose attorney general nominee John Ashcroft last week, his former Senate colleague, Barbara Boxer of California, said an extraordinary thing. The NAACP and other groups had alleged that Ashcroft's vote not to confirm Missouri Judge Ronnie White had something to do with White's being black. Ashcroft claimed the vote was due to White's anti-death-penalty stance, and his record backed him up. He had approved eight of nine black judicial nominees while governor of Missouri, and 26 of 28 in the Senate. So a reporter thought to ask Boxer whether she thinks Ashcroft is racist. "I never use that word against anyone," Boxer replied. "I can only judge John Ashcroft by his actions, and what I am telling you is that he engineered a humiliating defeat for Ronnie White." Patty Murray of Washington applied the same tactic: calling Ashcroft a racist without calling him a racist. "One of the questions," Murray said, "is the treatment of Ronnie White, not from a racial perspective so much, but how it was handled."
What do you mean, "how it was handled"? You're a senator! You were there when it was handled!
Why won't Boxer use the word "racist"? Customarily, the only words that society sets rules against using are obscenities and insults that serve no descriptive function. Any word with any descriptive power whatsoever can be used?is expected to be used?in civilized company. One could say, "I don't use the word dago," or "I don't use the word asshole." But no one would say, "I don't use the word felon," or "I don't use the word sadist." What Boxer is admitting without realizing it is something that conservatives have understood for a long time: that the once-useful word "racist" has become just an incantation meant to rile up voters without any evidence.
Not even Missouri Sen. Jean Carnahan, to whom Ashcroft lost a bitter campaign last fall after the death of her husband Gov. Mel Carnahan, thinks there's anything to the charge. "I don't know what was in his heart that caused him to vote the way he did over the Ronnie White issue," she says, "but I'm not convinced it was racial." That still won't stop her from trying to scuttle Ashcroft. Carnahan's campaign manager Marc Farinella has begun sharing the campaign's opposition research with Ashcroft opponents at People for the American Way. Carnahan's allies are trying to distance her from this rather sleazy operation?and finding it impossible.
First they claimed Farinella had done nothing wrong, since much of the material he gave to PAW is in the public record. But that's not true: even if the oppo file consists only of newspaper clippings, it's "work product": somebody at the Carnahan campaign assembled it and for legal purposes it's a Carnahan campaign creation. So Carnahan's supporters argued that it hadn't been Mrs. Carnahan's campaign in the first place; it was the campaign of her late husband, who died a month before Election Day. But surely that was Sen. Carnahan and not her late husband who was giving all the speeches and spending all the campaign money in that last month before the election?
Finally, Farinella said that he was just doing this personally, that the Carnahan campaign is uninvolved. But it can't be. The campaign paid for the stuff, and they own it. Farinella is either using it with their permission or he's not.
Even her adversaries will have to admit that the more one learns of Katherine Harris, the more one likes her. Named last week in a lawsuit by the NAACP and the ACLU, she has thus far eschewed vindictiveness, and even took it upon herself to say she would refuse an administration appointment of the goodwill-ambassador-to-the-nightclubs-of-South-America sort that everyone accuses her of angling for. Best of all, in her interview with Diane Sawyer, she admitted that she gets a lot of those stylish clothes of hers at Target, and told a story about a shopping trip there a couple weeks ago. "The woman looked at my credit card and looked at me, and she goes, 'Katherine Harris.' And I said, 'Yeah... I only have on one layer of makeup. I'm incognito.'" I do love that woman.