Nannygate redux
If you hadn’t heard, Bernard Kerik has withdrawn his nomination to be Homeland Security Secretary, having recently discovered that he may have hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny and/or failed to pay her social security taxes. I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for him — it’s been over 10 years since this issue blew up in Zoe Baird’s face and at least in the greater Washington DC area, anyone who claims not to know the rules is either lying or undertook a deliberate strategy of plausible deniability. If anything, I’m feeling a certain grim satisfaction that men as well as women can get caught in this mess.
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On a related note, those of us at HHS are starting to wonder why a new Secretary-nominee hasn’t been named. The conventional wisdom around the Department (as well as in most newspapers) was that the nominee was likely to be Mark McClellen, currently head of CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — don’t ask what happened to the second M). But if he was going to be the nominee, it seems likely that it would have happened by now — he’s already been Senate-confirmed once, so is unlikely to have any issues like Kerik’s lurking in his past. So, we’ve got our fingers crossed that we’re not getting a wingnut.
