Poor Zoe Baird. Her name has already entered the language as a synonym for trouble. Along with "the Gary Hart syndrome," signifying compulsive womanizing, we now have "the Zoe Baird problem," meaning child-care infractions. Its chief usage is in the accusative: "Do you have a Zoe Baird problem?" That was the question that brought down Kimba Wood as a candidate for Attorney General (even though her answer was "No"). It was also the question that helped pluck the childless and unmarried Janet Reno from relative obscurity to become the President's nominee for the job. No kids, no nanny, no Zoe Baird problem. Reno, 54, who appears to be well qualified for the post, doesn't even have an immigrant gardener: she mows her own lawn.
But the domestic tribulations of most working women, and for that matter working men, are more like Baird's than Reno's. Two-thirds of American women with school-age children are in the labor force and require some sort of day- care arrangement. Nearly 60% of married men with kids have working wives. In the absence of the kind of subsidized day-care systems that exist in many European countries, most American families have become participants in an underground economy. For the wealthy, that may mean employing a live-in nanny, but not withholding taxes or asking to see a green card. For the less well- off, it may come down to paying a teenager to baby-sit in the afternoons or slipping cash to a neighbor who watches the kids. Anyone lucky enough to have found someone caring, trustworthy and affordable is not going to let a few tax laws wreck the arrangement that makes family life possible.
Last week the air was thick with confessions from such workers. "Do you have a Zoe Baird problem?" they asked one another. "Sure," said many, who had never thought to discuss the matter before. Fortunately, few of the confessors were inclined to seek a post with the Clinton Administration.
They had better not. After the President's political advisers determined that Americans are too dumb to understand the difference between Zoe Baird, who knowingly violated the law by employing two illegal aliens and paying them off the books, and Kimba Wood, who legally employed an alien and filed all the required taxes, they discovered that -- oops! -- they had inadvertently created a new hiring policy. Worse, its effect looked suspiciously like sex discrimination. So, compounding the error, the Administration decided to formalize its accidental policy and apply it to men as well as women. Henceforth, the Administration announced, all candidates for the hundreds of government jobs subject to Senate confirmation must pass the Zoe Baird litmus test.
The irony is that the first dual-career parents ever to occupy the White House have created a policy that discriminates against folks like themselves, not to mention single parents. Surely they must know this. As two politically ambitious attorneys, the Clintons have always made sure that Chelsea's baby- sitting arrangements were strictly by the book. But among the legions of high-powered Friends of Bill and Friends of Hillary, there are undoubtedly dozens who have been less scrupulous. Recent Census Bureau and IRS data suggest that only 1 in 4 people who employ household help bothers to pay Social Security taxes. Given the natural reluctance to confide in government agents, the real figure is probably much lower.