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Nanny and Zoe - Zoe Baird's problems with her nomination for US Attorney General after her failure to pay Social Security taxes for her domestic help was exposed - Editorial
National Review, Feb 15, 1993
We feel a twinge of sympathy for Zoe Baird. Her tenure as a corporate general counsel and her support for Dan Quayle's tort-reform campaign suggested a relatively sane choice for attorney general. Ralph Nader's hysterical opposition confirmed our sentiment. And Miss Baird's replacement will almost certainly be worse.
But poor Miss Baird did herself in. It wasn't just the hiring of an undocumented alien couple as nanny and driver - since 1986 a federal crime, and one particularly inappropriate for a putative boss of the FBI and INS. The quick firing of the unfortunate couple right after the election suggested a combination of ruthlessness and guilty conscience.
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The Washington drama that unfolded thereafter was fascinating to watch. Democratic senators were not making a big deal of the nanny problem (just as Clinton transition officials had minimized it). Didn't everyone do it? Well, everyone they knew. Republicans were equally indulgent because they saw Miss Baird (rightly or wrongly) as a closet moderate. And the challenge from Mr. Nader and his lobby of wealthy trial lawyers, though naturally well financed, had too rank a smell to succeed on its own.
But when the story of the Peruvian couple hit the evening news, vox populi was heard in a roar. Radio call-in shows became the kind of national town meeting that both Bill Clinton and Ross Perot had called for. Mail and phone calls to congressional offices were overwhelming and negative. Just as with the congressional pay raise of 1989, Washington was rudely reminded how out of touch it was with public sentiment. Much of this was class-war demagogy of a crude and resentful kind. That it was directed against "people like them" came as a particular shock for many liberal yuppies, who had imagined their meritocratic prosperity to be popularly validated by their identification with compassionate causes.
There are important lessons here. Democrats are already arguing that it proves the need for free national child care. We can well imagine that yuppie liberals would like to see the taxpayer-finance their nannies - a considerable improvement on merely avoiding the taxes consequent on employing the nannies themselves. We reach exactly the opposite conclusion. What the Zoe Baird episode illustrates is the constitutional and practical folly of introducing forms of taxation that can only be collected by coercing ordinary citizens into becoming unpaid IRS agents. Miss Baird - like, we suspect, almost all of Mr. Clinton's actual and potential appointees - thought herself above this legal obligation; she is probably the only one of them sensible enough to think the legal obligation a bad thing. And morally, is her action very different from President Clinton's sending his daughter to a private school while denying private-school choice to most Americans?
COPYRIGHT 1993 National Review, Inc.
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