Labor's Fight Has Just Begun

In the end, Linda Chavez undid her own nomination through her disingenuousness. Bush's first nominee as Labor Secretary withdrew after a storm of publicity about her relationship with a Guatemalan woman who was illegally in the United States and doing chores at Chavez's home while living with Chavez and being given money by her.

Chavez apparently broke federal laws in her actions, but if providing a room and money to Marta Mercado had really been a humanitarian act and not a way of getting housework done on the cheap, Chavez might have survived a tough fight. But she was not upfront about her past with members of the Bush transition team, and they essentially abandoned her.

Chavez was right to decry the "politics of personal destruction," which focuses on finding personal shortcomings and minor legal violations to undermine political figures, but she was a hypocrite in the extreme in her invocation of that charge. Few people have engaged in such political blood sport with as much energy as Chavez, who blasted Clinton's 1993 nominee Zoë Baird for having employed an immigrant; who engaged in barely concealed race-baiting and gay-baiting against her 1986 Maryland Senate race opponent, Barbara Mikulski; and who regularly attacked even the most modest and established regulations of the economy, like the minimum wage, as "Marxist."

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.