The Chavez Debacle: A personal account - onetime Secretary of Labor appointee Linda Chavez

National Review, Feb 5, 2001 by John J. Miller

Yet there were those in the media who hoped she had-and they seemed willing to twist facts in order to get the story they wanted. ABC News, which broke the story about Chavez, was especially aggressive in pursuing her. "Chavez says she occasionally gave [Mercado] money, a few hundred dollars at a time, and did not consider it pay for a job," said correspondent John Yang on January 8. Then he intoned, ominously, "Mercado is not so certain." Oh really? That's strange, because Mercado had been telling reporters over and over that she was not an employee of Chavez's. In fact, that was the story ABCNews.com had been posting all day long: "An undocumented immigrant who lived with labor secretary-designate Linda Chavez in the early 1990s told ABC News the Bush nominee gave her money out of kindness, not payment." It might also be noted that Margaret Zwisler's brother is Terry Moran, an ABC News correspondent, and that her lawyer, Neil Eggleston, is a former White House counsel for Bill Clinton and a close friend of Clinton-aide-turned-ABC-News-personality George Stephanopoulos.

There were also those who made it seem as if Chavez lived on a plantation manor, even though they had no real knowledge of the facts. Jesse Jackson charged "indentured servitude," no less. The AFL-CIO's Linda Chavez-Thompson (no relation) asked, "When you have a woman living in your home, then are you not, in fact, having indentured slaves working for you?"

So many misperceptions might have been avoided if the nominee had simply been allowed to sit in front of a television camera for an interview. Chavez could have said what she finally said in her withdrawal announcement: "I took [a woman] into my home in the early 1990s, who came from a very abusive relationship, who fled Guatemala at a time of turmoil in that country, who landed in the United States knowing no one and having no friends, and having no place to live and no way to support herself. I was asked by a friend if I would in fact provide her with a room in my home and try to help her, so that she could get back on her feet and eventually return to her family in Guatemala. And I did that. And I did that, even at the time knowing that there was some risk to doing it." That's not a bad story. In fact, it's downright compelling. Should Chavez really have turned Marta Mercado away? Imagine that she had-and that liberals, during her confirmation, had found out.

Add to this the stories of the people who surrounded Chavez during her withdrawal-the Vietnamese refugee who lived with her during the 1970s, the Puerto Rican children whose parochial-school tuition Chavez is paying, and so on. Here was all the diversity of the GOP's Philadelphia convention, with the added advantage of being authentic.

Yet all of this remained bottled up, thanks to a gag order imposed on all cabinet nominees by the Bush team. As the hours wore on, and the media remained perplexed about Chavez and Mercado, support for Chavez took a nosedive in Bush circles. They said she hadn't been forthcoming. They questioned her loyalty. By Monday night, January 8, Chavez wondered whether she really had Bush's backing. On Tuesday morning, she told me she did in fact want to go forward with her nomination. But by early afternoon, she made a decision, on her own, that this wasn't possible without the full support of the transition office. So she chose to withdraw. And when she walked on stage to do that, a few minutes after 4:00 p.m. on January 9, no Bush representative came out with her. Chavez had suggested that somebody make an introduction, if only to prevent pundits from wondering why she was alone. She had been under the impression that a Bush person would accompany her on stage. It didn't happen, though, and she formally withdrew surrounded by family and friends.