Zoe Baird

LOOK at the Zoe Baird nomination story and imagine that the genders had been reversed: The nominee for attorney general was a man, Aetna's general counsel, earning $500,000 a year. His wife was a Yale law professor; she made the child care arrangements, hiring illegal aliens after discussing it with immigration lawyers. Would the nominee have been swamped by a storm of public indignation?I am not sure, but I doubt it. I think many who protested in Ms. Baird's case would have said to themselves that child care was the woman's concern.

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.

There they sat, all those distinguished United States senators. Hour after hour, they poked and probed the mind of the person nominated to be the highest ranking law enforcement official in the United States.And what were they talking about most of the time? Baby-sitting.That's what the Senate confirmation hearing for Zoe Baird boiled down to -- how a working mother goes about finding a trustworthy baby sitter.Once in a while, a senator would toss in a question about something else, such as her qualifications to run the Justice Department, which includes about 90,000 people.

NOTES ON ZOE BAIRD: I said here last Monday that Zoe Baird "shouldn't be confirmed," and I never wavered from that view -- but once.That was last Thursday. I was watching her confirmation hearings on the tube. There was a whole lot of Role Reversal going on.R.R. 1. Some conservative Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee were praising her and vowing to vote for her. Some liberal Democrats were expressing doubts.R.R. 2. A senator named Dianne was quizzing Ms. Baird about law and order, crime in the street, narcotics, AK-47s.

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.

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."

IF THOSE who have complained so loudly about talk radio in the past few days have their political wits about them, they will quit worrying about how reactionary, unfair and distorted it is, and figure out what to do about it.Right-wing radio shows have been around since the late Joe Pyne. But they have suddenly become a hot topic because of the role they played in the fall of Zoe Baird and the furor over gays in the military. The tidal wave of telephone calls they generated are this week's manifestation of the new age of interactive media, which is changing all politics in its wake.

THREE things to begin with:The first is that I know Kimba Wood, which is my good fortune.The second is that if I had to choose three words to describe her, they would be these: integrity, decency, and intelligence.And the third thing is that she does not have what is now known as a Zoe Baird problem, although she has been made to pay for Zoe Baird's sins.Insiders predicted that Judge Wood, who sits on the federal bench in New York and is best known for sentencing Michael Milken, would be named the first female attorney general of the United States.

The question came from Angelos Vlahakis of East Lansing, Mich. But in one form or another, it was being asked by countless other Americans this week. "About Zoe Baird," Mr. Vlahakis said. "Why must we, the common citizens, obey the laws of the land while the new attorney general, the chief law person of the country, is allowed to break the law and get away with a mild rebuke? What kind of precedent does that set?"He's right, although Zoe Baird didn't get off with a mild rebuke. Before she withdrew her nomination last Friday, Baird had paid a substantial penalty for having hired a couple of illegal aliens as domestic help.

There is an old saying to the effect that if a cat jumps on a hot stove it will never do that again -- or jump on a cold one, either. President Clinton behaved like that last week when he refused to nominate his choice for attorney general, Judge Kimba Wood, because he found out she had once hired a domestic worker who was in the country illegally. Having been burned on the illegal alien issue before in the case of Zoe Baird, the president shied away -- even though the metaphorical stove in the Wood case was cold.