On the core charge – that Meg Whitman employed an undocumented immigrant – she has nothing to be ashamed of. Plenty of Californians have done so, knowingly and unknowingly. If this makes her a hypocrite, so what? Immigration law is so thoroughly divorced from the human reality of California that most of us are hypocrites on this issue.
No, Whitman’s problem is how she has reacted to the story. The trouble is not just that she’s had to change her story, most disastrously in insisting neither she nor her husband ever got a letter from the Social Security Administration that he appears to have received. Her righteous attitude — the sense she exuded in Wednesday’s press conference that she didn’t and couldn’t have done the wrong thing – has turned this into a morality play about Whitman’s character. This is bad news for Whitman in two ways.
It’s hard to emerge as the hero of such plays. And the whole story is off message — voters don’t really care about Whitman personally. They care about what she might be able to do for them as governor.
Instead of issuing a blanket apology (for employing the housekeeper in question and for any injury that she had suffered, with an offer to do whatever was needed to make things right), Whitman has sought to blame others, including the housekeeper and her insufferable lawyer. Yes, she may be right that the housekeeper conned her and Gloria Allred is a publicity-seeking attorney with a political axe to grind. But so what? How does starting an argument with them help Whitman?
Meg also needs to cut the condescension. The way she talks about her former housekeeper as being "manipulated" by her lawyer and larger forces borders on the offensive.
Nicky Diaz Santillan is a grown-up. According to forms she filled out in 2000 (and yes, these are the same forms in which she claims to be legally in this country, so take this with a big dose of salt), Diaz Santillan earned high school and college degrees in Mexico City before coming to the U.S. She also was, at that time, attending college, here in the U.S. I was in the room as Diaz Santillan during her Tuesday press conference. There were no guards preventing her from walking out the door. Instead, she read a statement before a room overflowing with journalists. She is not a naïf. Heck, Diaz Santillan shrewdly appears to have done a better job of keeping important paperwork in order than the high-powered Whitman. And the housekeeper proved more credible than Whitman’s brain surgeon husband in Wednesday’s exchange over Social Security letters.
Diaz Santillan has chosen to come forward, and will bear the consequences of that decision. Whitman should address Diaz Santillan directly and stop describing her as a tool of her lawyer and others.
If Whitman and her team conclude that it’s too politically problematic to go after Diaz Santillan directly, then the best thing to do here would be to retreat and apologize. And to try to get back, as quickly as possible, to issues that matter.