Bill Clinton promised to have diversity, and last week he began delivering. Of his first 11 appointments, men were ahead in the gender game, 7-4, but women felt like the winners. For his economic team, Clinton picked former Congressional Budget Office -director Alice Rivlin as deputy budget director and Berkeley economist Laura D’Andrea Tyson as the first woman ever to run the Council of Economic Advisers. A pair of social activists, Donna Shalala and Carol Browner, will head Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency. A number of posts will be filled by minorities: Democratic Party chair and superlawyer Ron Brown to Commerce, with Mississippi Rep. Mike Espy expected to get Agriculture. “Once you establish this as a precedent, you can’t go back,” says New York Republican Rep. Susan Molinari.
As Clinton went about his balancing act, the tension was evident on both sides. The beneficiaries-women and minorities-watched to make certain they weren’t simply filling positions labeled as affirmative-action slots. Clinton’s transition team waded through thousands of resumes, the majority from white males impressively schooled and thickly credentialed. The president-elect’s early choices for his economic team made some people nervous about his commitment. With the exception of budgeter Alice Rivlin, it looked “like he dropped a net over the Kiwanis Club,” quipped Democratic Rep. Patricia Schroeder. But Clinton recovered in the next wave of announcements, which were dominated by women. Indeed, standing on the stage flanked by women chosen to head top social-policy posts, labor secretary nominee Robert Reich looked like a first for Washington: a token male.
There is speculation that Clinton will name a woman or a minority as attorney general, cracking the old-boys club that has had a lock on the Big Four power posts (Justice, State, Defense and Treasury). “Hillary must know a thousand women lawyers,” says Schroeder. Presidential scholar James MacGregor Burns predicts that women voters will be the bedrock of Clinton’s support just as labor mobilized for Franklin Roosevelt and the civil-rights movement gave Presidents Kennedy and Johnson a grass-roots boost. “It is the women who will rescue him after the honeymoon is over,” says Burns.
Diversity is about more than cosmetics. The real goal is to encourage different viewpoints, to have a government that reflects the lives of what the Washington power structure calls “real people.” When columnist Christopher Matthews ran a Nexis computer search of Berkeley economist Laura Tyson, 45, it came up blank. Although she has written extensively, she is not on the sound-bite circuit. “When you go beyond white men, you go beyond the Beltway,” says Clinton aide Paul Begala.
Clinton’s choice to head HHS, Donna Shalala, 51, is the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin and a longtime FOH (friend of Hillary). Shalala succeeded Hillary as chair of the Children’s Defense Fund board. A streetsmart liberal who supports innovative welfare reform, she will amplify Hillary’s “voice for children.” Florida environmentalist Carol Browner, 37, edged out the more experienced ex-Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin for the Environmental Protection Agency. Browner had the blessings of Vice President-elect Al Gore, whom she had once worked for, and the advantage of a big-state sun-belt byline. Chart Clinton’s picks on an electoral map (California, Wisconsin, Florida), and it looks like the ‘96 campaign is already underway.
Clinton’s diversity campaign reaches well below the cabinet level. Even the Secret Service has been affected. When supporters complained during the campaign that Clinton was always surrounded by white men, he made sure that the security detail around him included more blacks and women-a commitment to diversity of the most personal sort.
