DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

Back in the 1990s a pal and fellow television reporter, Larry Wissbeck, and I were chatting about a flurry of news stories that had started appearing around the nation. They were often broadcast under the shorthand name of "home alone" crimes and involved child welfare agencies seizing children who were left home alone by parents.

On the assumption that such crimes had been happening all along, Larry and I were discussing what had made them suddenly so newsworthy. I suggested that, given journalism's love of cutesy phrases, we had suddenly started covering them because there was now a term from a popular movie to describe the crimes.

Larry felt, and I think he was right, that mores had also changed. Until relatively recently, leaving children at home was a parent's decision and neither society nor government second guessed it. Most people our age had grown up with the experience of being left alone at home when we were small children (or in the care of another slightly older but still very young child) and there was no particular stigma attached to the practice. This may sound strange to those who did not live through it, and that just makes clear how things have changed.

These kinds of changes can happen fast, or at any rate they creep up on us without our being aware of it until someone puts a name on it that brands it unfavorably. A good example of that is the practice of which Jim and Dawn Gibbons now stand accused, of hiring an illegal alien. It's a practice that was pretty common for many years and would still be going on if one political party had not found some political advantage in blowing the whistle on it.

In 1992-3 when the president-elect, Bill Clinton, was choosing his cabinet, he nominated Aetna Life and Casualty chief counsel Zoe Baird to be attorney general. The nomination blew up in his face when it became known that she had employed illegal aliens as a chauffer and a nanny and, worse, had failed to pay their benefits like social security and workers injury insurance. An indication of how normal this was in affluent circles is that it aroused little criticism in either Republican or Democratic circles. But talk show hosts ran with it and the grass roots were soon alive with protests.

Baird withdrew and Clinton nominated U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood, a Reagan appointee, to be attorney general. It turned out that Wood, too, had employed an illegal alien, though her offense was mitigated because she had paid the proper benefits. Nevertheless, she too stepped down.

Suddenly, the employment of an illegal alien was a political silver bullet. In the New York Times, Michael Kelly wrote from D.C., "It's the first collective angst of the Clinton years, the unintended consequence of an unexpected job standard. It's a mess. It's Nannygate. For scores of prospective appointees to the Clinton Administration, suddenly and surprisingly, the ambitions of a lifetime rest on the question, not of education, or experience, or connections, but of practices in hiring household help."

Another Times report said, "In Central Park in Manhattan, nannies debate whether it is better to be paid over or under the table. And around the country, parents wonder whether hiring a nanny has become a test of character...[T]he nation is percolating with largely unanswered questions about child-care workers."

Before that time, many affluent people didn't even know how to check on the citizenship of employees. Immigration was not as sensitive an issue then as it is now.

It's not that easy to work up sympathy for wealthy people and their domestic worker problems, but the point is that most of the Gibbons' association with their employee (it reportedly began in 1987 and ended about a year after the Clinton disputes) took place in a very different climate than the one that exists today. Public attitudes evolve. The Gibbons' case happened at a time when most people regarded the offense as the equivalent of jaywalking.

That may have been foolish, but it was unquestionably so, and needs to be a part of any voter assessments of the Gibbons controversy.