Married with alibi: why women aspiring to political office shouldn't use the my-husband-did-it excuse.

• Author: Lehrman, Karen

As President Clinton's tortured quest for a female attorney general came to a half with an unmarried, childless woman who lived with her mother, some feminist commentators took to seeing the fiasco as further proof of a backlash against working women, especially working mothers. But before Zoe Baird becomes any sort of fashionable feminist icon, suburbia's answer to Anita Hill, it's important not to gloss over one of her saga's key plot points. When faced with explaining why she broke immigration law by hiring a couple of illegally situated babysitters, Baird, a lawyer for more than 15 years now earning nearly half a million dollars a year, did what every self-respecting housewife in the firties would have done: She blamed her husband.

True, she accepted responsibility for breaking the law, and she also apologized. But throughout the confirmation hearings, she repeatedly blamed Yale Law professor Paul Gewirtz for the screw-up: "Since my husband did this ... I understood from what my husband told me, not reading the statute or not from talking to the lawyers myself... My understanding of the legal advice coming to me secondhand... My understanding is that my husband did not complete an I-9 form .... "

According to Baird, it was Gewirtz who handled all of the legal and tax work in hiring the Peruvian couple. The implication is that Gewirtz didn't do a very good job as the family's lawyer and that he didn't fully inform his wife of what was at stake. Either way, Baird or her handlers felt she could gain sympathy and perhaps even absolve herself of some responsibility if Gewirtz was prepared to shoulder blame.

Her husband may have botched the matter, but that doesn't excuse Baird for not being fully involved in the decision-making in the first place. Indeed, what Baird knew and when she knew it seems entirely secondary; opting out of, or not wanting to know about, a serious legal issue concerning her family is what is damning. Equality, after all, begins in the home. Just as disconcerting was how Baird seemed to want special dispensation both as a distracted careerist on the go and as a concerned and somewhat frantic mommy. "Quite honestly, I was acting at that time really more as a mother than as someone who would be sitting here designated to be attorney general," she told the committee. How does being a mother absolve you of taking an interest in the family's financial affairs?

Baird, who apparently rose from a working class background by...