New presidents' errors make primer for Obama

Even as rumors float through Washington this week that Obama might offer the job of secretary of state to Sen. Hillary Clinton, her husband’s opening weeks as president serve as a cautionary lesson in how not to deal with nominees and changes in policy.

Clinton was scarred by two battles in the first weeks of his presidency.

Hiring illegal immigrants
After Bill Clinton won the 1992 election, he and Hillary Clinton had decreed that the new attorney general must be a woman. The nominee for secretary of state, Warren Christopher, suggested one of his protégées, corporate lawyer Zoe Baird. 

But she and her husband had hired illegal immigrants from Peru to work for them as a nanny and a chauffeur. “Zoe hadn’t concealed the nanny issue,” Clinton wrote in his memoirs. “We had simply underestimated its significance.”

The attorney general had the job of enforcing immigration laws, and the idea of a law-breaker as the new attorney general was not viable. Baird withdrew.

Looking back on his transition later, Clinton admitted , “I gave almost no thought to how to keep the public’s focus on my most important priorities, rather than on competing stories that, at the least would divert public attention from the big issues and, at worst, could make it appear that I was neglecting those priorities.”

Gays in uniform
On the heels of the Baird embarrassment, Clinton had to fight the Joint Chiefs of Staff over his proposal to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the U.S. military.

There was overwhelming opposition in Congress, led by Nunn and by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., who warned that Clinton’s proposal “will lead to same-sex marriages and homosexuals in the Boy Scouts.”

The new president had to retreat.

“I got the worst of both worlds,” Clinton said later. “I lost the fight, and the gay community was highly critical of me for the compromise, simply refusing to acknowledge the consequences of having so little support in Congress….”

Clinton’s GOP foes played up the gays in military furor, “which caused a lot of Americans who had elected me to fix the economy to wonder what on earth I was doing and whether they’d made a mistake.”

But Clinton survived his initial blunders. He would make more, as in his handling of the health insurance reform plan in 1994. But he seemed to thrive on adversity and won a second term in 1996 with even more electoral votes than in 1992.

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