Now both Herman and her world are on trial. As Clinton’s nominee to head the Department of Labor, the once obscure 49-year-old White House aide, former business consultant and Democratic activist would become the highest ranking African-American woman in the administration. Herman must first convince a GOP Senate that she didn’t go too far mixing partisan politics and official business–and given the questions about Democratic fund raising, she is a very tempting target. Is Alexis Herman the superachieving civil-rights pioneer the White House says she is, or is Herman–as her critics suggest–a Clintonite who shamelessly traded access for political and personal favors?
Her rise is undeniably dramatic. The daughter of a Mobile, Ala., teacher and a politically active father who was the first black wardsman elected in the state since Reconstruction, Herman attended segregated parochial schools. A deeply religious child, she absorbed the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. After earning a degree in sociology from Xavier University in New Orleans, she compiled an impressive do-good rEsumE: Catholic Services social worker and board member of the National Council of Negro Women. At the age of 29 she was a top official in Jimmy Carter’s Labor Department. Herman is a label-defying Democrat: she worked closely with Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, yet during the pro-business Clinton 1990s she maintained such close ties to corporate interests that organized labor was in- itially reluctant to support her nomination.
During the Reagan years Herman became a management consultant. She profited from some of the same job-training grants she had been involved in awarding when she worked for the government. Herman ran a lucrative consulting practice, advising major corporations how to implement affirmative-action guidelines. Critics charge that many of her clients were coerced into hiring her by Jackson’s Operation Push, which boycotted companies that failed to diversify their work forces. (Herman’s supporters claim her clients were happy with her work, and some have in fact written letters of recommendation to the Senate Labor Committee.) The White House has promised that Herman will answer all questions about her business and White House conduct in her confirmation hearing.
Senate investigators would also like to know how Herman earned a $500,000 profit from a share of a Washington development project she received for providing minority-contracting advice, without making any initial investment. Meanwhile, they are also looking into allegations that Herman misused her expense account to support first-class travel, deluxe accommodations and personal entertainment while serving as Democratic National Committee staff director under Brown. Some of the DNC habits proved hard to break. When Herman joined the Clinton White House in 1993, she complained that as an assistant to the president, she was entitled to a car and driver. She wasn’t: Clinton had eliminated the perk.
Republicans are most intrigued by Herman’s role in organizing ““coffees’’ between Clinton and Democratic donors. The White House has acknowledged that Herman’s office of public liaison helped to arrange at least 15 coffees, including one last May at which bankers met with the federal officer charged with regulating their industry–a session the White House later admitted was inappropriate. Herman says a deputy had prepared the guest list and that she herself had not attended the meeting.
Worried by rumors that the administration was going soft on Herman’s nomination, chief of staff Erskine Bowles invited 100 representatives from women’s, labor and civil-rights groups to the White House to announce a ““full-throttle effort’’ on her behalf. This week Senate Labor Committee chairman James Jeffords will finally schedule Herman’s hearing. ““If anybody wants to vote against her, for whatever reason, they’re plainly free to do that,’’ Clinton says. ““But she deserves a hearing, and if she gets a hearing, she’s going to be confirmed.’’ That is by no means guaranteed–as Herman, a student of political hardball, no doubt knows.
