Zoe Baird

THE Zoe Baird affair is not mainly about technical violations of immigration and Social Security laws. It is about social class; it reminds us that the rich continue to be judged by a kinder and gentler set of standards, even in a Democratic administration. And it threatens to rain on Bill Clinton's populist parade.The official explanations don't wash. Supposedly, Ms. Baird and her husband, a renowned Yale law professor, had relied on "competent legal counsel" to assure them that hiring two undocumented workers and then not paying their Social Security taxes was not legally risky.

LANI GUINIER is the University of Pennsylvania law professor who was nominated by President Clinton to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, then un-nominated when criticism of her views mounted.Her travail followed that of Zoe Baird, who had previously been nominated to be attorney general but had to withdraw.Ms. Guinier spoke to the National Press Club in Washington recently. She began this way:"Thank you very much. As you can all imagine, this has been a most interesting year and a half for me. I have gone from relative obscurity to being someone that people stop in the street and introduce themselves to."

Not everybody does it. People who can afford full-time "domestics," people who can afford attorneys to advise them on immigration laws, people who can afford to pay penalties should they get caught with illegal aliens in their homes -- they do it.These are the same people, Washington insiders among them, who didn't think such an insignificant matter -- "tut-tut" -- could keep Zoe Baird out of the attorney general's office. They considered her infraction a mere parking ticket on the windshield of a limousine.

WASHINGTON -- Bill is backing Hillary?Big deal.He backed Zoe Baird -- for a while. He backed Kimba Wood -- for a while. He backed Lani Guinier -- for a while.But when they became political liabilities, he cut them loose.Will he do the same to Hillary?Actually, no.There are at least 10 Reasons Why Bill Won't Dump Hillary:10. She's not nearly as nuts as Bobby Inman was.9. She's the only one who knows the numbers to the Swiss bank accounts.8. She leaks goofy statistics to Ross Perot.7. She inhaled only once and that was before marrying Bill.

WASHINGTON -- A woman lawyer whose boss says she is " hell of a friend to have in a fight" is President-elect Bill Clinton's surprise choice to lead a government department that has been in turmoil for years as the action arm of deeply conservative White House political causes.Zoe Baird -- her first name is pronounced "ZOH-ee" -- is the 40-year-old corporate attorney designated by Mr. Clinton to become the nation's first woman to serve as U.S. attorney general and thus as the chief of the beleaguered Justice Department.

The White House that did not understand what Zoe Baird did wrong could not understand that Kimba Wood didn't.If Ron Brown failed to pay Social Security for a part-time cleaning woman, he is unfit to be atty gen or Treasury sec'y.Tell those Yugoslavs and Europeans to just hold the fort and, pretty soon, Bill will have a policy about that.7+ Cheer up. It's the year of the rooster.

You can take the boy out of Hope, Arkansas, but you can't take Hope out of the boy. Many foreign dignitaries were on hand. Saddam couldn't make it. Zoe Baird is the sort of legal statesperson that Ron Reagan would have been proud to have in his cabinet. Dontay Carter did more to shake up government around here than Don Schaefer in his prime.

Here's what Zoe Baird told Sen. Joseph Biden Jr. and his Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this week:She said she and her law professor husband knew they were breaking the law in 1990 by hiring illegal aliens as domestic workers and by not paying their Social Security taxes.She said that what she had done was wrong and that she deeply regrets it.She said she hoped the committee would understand that when she broke the law she "was acting at that moment more as a mother than as a person who would be sitting here before you to be attorney general."

THE ZOE BAIRD story is a reminder of why journalists prefer covering Democratic administrations to Republican ones.The hypocrisy quotient is so much higher with the Democrats. It's fun to expose phonies in high places. So dust off the "limousine liberal" key on the word processor.Zoe Baird is the attorney general designate. She has been hiring illegal immigrants to work as domestics -- and not paying their or her own Social Security contributions.Now if a Republican did this, there's not much of a story.

WASHINGTON -- You could see the emotions race across Zoe Baird's face the moment she walked into the Senate hearing room.On Tuesday, when Bill Clinton's choice for attorney general had to face the Judiciary Committee for the first time, she was nervous, but that was understandable.Everybody knew she had broken the law by hiring illegal aliens and she knew she would be questioned about it.But by yesterday, the second day of the hearings, Baird's nervousness had been replaced by other emotions: fear, depression and a small amount of combativeness.

JANUARY1 -- President-elect William Jefferson Rodham Kennedy Clinton, preparing for the task of being the most powerful human on Earth after 4,000 straight months on the campaign trail, sits down with his top aides and a complete set of the World Book Encyclopedia to learn about all these foreign countries.13 -- The nomination of Zoe Baird, Clinton's choice for attorney general, appears to be in trouble following reports that she is an illegal alien.16 -- In a highly symbolic display of symbolism, Bill Clinton and Al Gore begin a historic ride from Monticello, near Charlottesville, Va., to Washington, in the exact same bus that Thomas Jefferson used.

WASHINGTON -- In another instance of a problem that has plagued the Clinton administration for a year, the White House acknowledged yesterday that Defense Secretary-designate Bobby Ray Inman did not pay Social Security taxes for a part-time housekeeper he and his wife have employed since 1986.Mr. Inman paid some $6,000 in back taxes yesterday, and any additional fees in the form of penalties or interest would becalculated by the Internal Revenue Service, White House officials said.Communications Director Mark Gearan also said that Mr. Inman had informed President Clinton of this situation before being selected last week to replace Les Aspin at the Pentagon.

Washington. -- Maybe this is what President Clinton meant by "re-inventing government": Call it government by "trial balloon."On almost every major issue facing the administration -- issues ranging from U.S. military strategy to key personnel appointments to a vast overhaul of health care -- the Clinton administration routinely floats an idea or a name or an approach so that it can gauge public opinion before it acts.Going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, presidents have used leaks to "run things up the flag pole and see if anyone salutes," in the words of William Leuchtenberg, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of several books on the presidency.

A DICTIONARY of Washington Eponymical Etymology:TO BORK, verb. The act of scrutinizing to death a nominee for high public office. The word derives from Robert Bork, a Supreme Court nominee whose record was examined so minutely by the Senate Judiciary Committee that the rest of the Senate, assuming there must be something wrong with anyone who needed that much scrutiny, refused to confirm him. Usage examples: "Unless Clinton nominates people acceptable to...

Boston.--When I was a kid, I had a friend whose family business advertised on its trucks. The front of the trucks read ''Here Comes Grossman's.'' The back of the trucks read ''There Goes Grossman's.''If you passed one going the other way on a highway, you went from ''Here Comes'' to ''There Goes'' so fast that you never had time to get a very good look at the person in the cab of the truck.I have thought of that image -- Here Comes, There Goes -- a dozen times when the candidate for some post or other zoomed across the national screen as fast as a speeding truck.

WASHINGTON -- The applause began for Janet Reno even before she entered the Senate hearing room.In the hallway, the people who had waited in line for more than an hour just for the chance to see her, began to clap as soon as she came into view.Reno loped past them, smiling a little and then ducking her head shyly when some people inside the room rose and gave her a standing ovation.Having selected Zoe Baird, having virtually selected Kimba Wood, Bill Clinton has now nominated Janet Reno to be our attorney general.

Boston -- When Zoe Baird streaked across the national sky from anonymity to ignominy in two weeks, I was one of her few defenders. I didn't think that hiring an undocumented nanny was a career-ending injury. Illegal child care is as common in the '90s as smoking dope was in the '60s.Well, if Zoe Baird was judged and convicted of smoking without inhaling, Kimba Wood was just found guilty of getting a contact high. She didn't break any law, she was just standing around breathing in the atmospheric fumes.

Let's see: We don't have an attorney general. We don't hav a deputy attorney general. We don't have a solicitor general.So if you were planning on breaking a federal law, this might be a good time to do it.Just kidding. There are people acting in those roles plus a 91,000-person bureaucracy at the Justice Department just waiting to pounce on you if you even dream about it.It's just a little void at the top we have at the moment. And thetop is the place in any organization that can almost always use a void.

Baltimore lawyer Edward N. Leavy can relate to Zoe Baird, and he says many other working couples can, too.Mr. Leavy, an immigration specialist with the law firm Weinberg & Green, says he once spent 2 1/2 years haggling with U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials to gain legal status for his Salvadoran housekeeper.Many young families employ illegal aliens as housekeepers and nannies in violation of U.S. immigration laws -- often, he says, because it takes as many as eight years for the aliens to get permanent visas that make them legal residents.

To the list of such "isms" as racism, sexism and ageism, let us now add another: Call it singleism.Which is to say: bias against those who never marry in a society that considers marriage the "norm."Divorced people do not fit into this category since, even though they have "failed" at marriage, they still have done the "normal" thing.Young bachelors and bachelorettes do not fit into this category because it is presumed that once having sown their wild oats they will marry and settle down.