Zoe Baird

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.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton had a tough first day at the Oval Office yesterday, as reality quickly overtook the revelry of inauguration.His morning-after-the-night-before brought him trouble abroad and at home: more U.S. bombs falling on Iraq and his nominee for attorney general, Zoe Baird, heading deeper into trouble.Both could produce increasing difficulties for Mr. Clinton, provoking early tests of his diplomatic and political leadership, but he showed no signs of sensing impending crises.

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.

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."

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.

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 -- Zoe Baird, Bill Clinton's nominee to be attorney general, employed two Peruvians living illegally in the United States as her baby sitter and part-time driver for nearly two years, government and Clinton transition officials said yesterday.Transition officials said the couple began working for Ms. Baird in the summer of 1990, when she was about to take a job at Aetna Life and Casualty in Hartford, Conn. The husband stopped working for Ms. Baird in March 1992, but the wife continued to help care for her 3-year-old son until the woman left or was dismissed shortly after the election.

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.