Intense vetting underway for Obama hires
WASHINGTON -- The first thing then-White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein did was apologize to the job candidate he was about to interview. He told him he was going to ask him very personal questions that would make them both uncomfortable.
"You're going to want to go home and take a shower when this is over — and so am I," Duberstein says he told the candidate, a man whose privacy he insists on protecting, even two decades later.
As President Reagan's gatekeeper, he was determined to protect his boss from the embarrassment and distraction of a bungled nomination to one of the top jobs in the country.
That's what President-elect Barack Obama's team is doing now as they scour the backgrounds of hundreds of candidates for everything from mid-level White House jobs to the Cabinet.
"In this process, you're guilty until proven innocent," says Paul Light, a professor at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
Using an updated version of the types of vetting questionnaires used by transition teams and White House staffers before them, Obama's lawyers are asking candidates to dig deep and come forward with some of the most private details of their personal and professional lives — as well as those of their spouses.
An e-mail that could be embarrassing? An old diary entry that makes you blush? A loan you're not proud of? A late tax payment? An arrest?
These all are on Obama's 63-item background questionnaire — and the word to those in the running for top jobs is that they better cough up the answers now because the information will surely come out later.
"It's about transparency," Duberstein says. "You have to ask these questions, because in any White House, there should be no surprises."
Problems aren't always rooted out before a candidate is publicly named.
Zoë Baird, Bill Clinton's initial pick for attorney general, withdrew when word got out that she'd hired and failed to pay taxes for an illegal immigrant who'd worked as her nanny.
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