The Chavez Debacle: A personal account.(onetime Secretary of Labor appointee Linda Chavez)

Linda Chavez called me at home a little before midnight on Saturday, January 6, worried. "Something has come up that may derail my confirmation," she said. Just four days earlier, President-elect Bush had nominated her for secretary of labor, in a move that surprised and delighted conservatives. I was certainly excited. Chavez had been my boss for five years. She was my mentor, and friend. And now there was a problem. Before I could even guess what it might be, she asked, "Do you remember Marta?"

I spent the next four days answering this question, not only to Chavez, but to the FBI, and the country in general. The nomination hinged on this matter of Marta Mercado, a one-time illegal immigrant from Guatemala who lived with Chavez in the early '90s. The scrutiny of their relationship became so intense, and the resulting confusion so great, that Chavez came to believe she had no choice but to withdraw her nomination. Yet from my perspective-an admittedly personal one, though informed by a close familiarity with the circumstances-she was confirmable right to the end. And, by not supporting her during a spell of foul weather, the Bush transition team has damaged its own short-term interests by allowing its enemies to focus fire on attorney general nominee John Ashcroft; it has damaged its long-term interests as well by denying itself a principled conservative whose life story is an inspiring lesson of achievement and charity.

There was never a doubt that Linda Chavez's confirmation would be rocky. She is perhaps the country's most articulate critic of bilingual education and a forceful advocate of color-blind equal opportunity. She also happens to be a Hispanic whose family roots in New Mexico go back nearly four centuries. Chavez first came to national prominence when President Reagan tapped her to lead the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She was still a Democrat at the time, working at the American Federation of Teachers-where, incidentally, she had penned the union's 1980 endorsement of Ted Kennedy for president. Conservatives greeted her appointment with some skepticism back then, but it wasn't long before they fell in love. Hers was a textbook case of neoconservative conversion-a hawkish Democrat from a working-class background who was first attracted to the GOP because of its strong anti-Communism. Like Reagan, Chavez has maintained that she didn't leave the Democratic party, but that it left her.

Her views are often said to be "controversial," but in reality they are in keeping with those of the American public, which is fond neither of teaching immigrant children in languages other than English, nor of sorting citizens by the color of their skin. Yet both bilingual education and racial preferences are important totems of modern liberalism. Opponents view Chavez with the special antipathy reserved for the likes of Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly. If those two men have been called "Oreos"-black on the outside, white on the inside-Chavez is said to be a brown-colored version of the same thing, a "coconut." Activists on the left will stop at nothing to keep people like Chavez from rising to influential posts, because they know they are living examples of why the Left's mindset is so disconnected from reality. In simple terms, the activists view Chavez as a race traitor.

The New York Times mentioned this sentiment with startling indelicacy in a story the day after her nomination: "Her opposition to affirmative action has caused her to be vilified by civil rights groups and to be physically threatened when she has spoken on college campuses," wrote reporter Steven A. Holmes. "That opposition-combined with her marriage to a Jew, Christopher Gersten, and the rearing of her three sons as Jews-have [sic] prompted some to term her a traitor to her people."

Chavez clearly elicits strong emotions, and she knows it. From the moment she was nominated, she anticipated a difficult fight. "I expect the very worst," she told me on January 5. By then, the worst already had started to come. In a statement released right after her nomination, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney dubbed her "an avowed opponent of the most basic workers' rights." As if this unthinking rhetoric weren't enough, Sweeney went on to allege, "She has been a vociferous and aggressive opponent of the federal minimum wage." When I read this, I scratched my head: It didn't sound like the Chavez I knew. I recalled a pair of columns, from the mid '90s, in which she criticized specific proposals to boost the minimum wage-but nothing to warrant calling her "a vociferous and aggressive opponent" of the wage itself. So I called the AFL-CIO, thinking that perhaps somebody had run across a provocative line buried in a stack of Chavez clips. A woman there told me they were still studying the matter, and, no, she couldn't point me toward any statement backing up the assertion. I called the next day, and got the same response. In the end, the AFL-CIO's opposition-research team came up empty-because Chavez never said any such thing. But that didn't stop Democratic senator John Kerry from echoing Sweeney: "She doesn't believe in the minimum wage."

There was a good deal more such distortion of her views. The "borking" of Linda Chavez was well under way-and then came the news about Marta.