In Defense of Max Baucus: Melodee Hanes Is Not a Bimbo

Last week, and for most of her career, Melodee Hanes was a talented litigator. This week, she’s a mistress and a health-reform killer.

Hanes, of course, is the romantic partner of Montana Sen. Max Baucus. She's also one of three candidates he recommended to the president as a potential U.S. attorney. Since the story broke on Friday, the reaction is as one would expect: accusations of cronyism, favoritism, and bad judgment. "Today's report that Sen. Max Baucus used his Senate office to advance a taxpayer-funded appointment for his staff member girlfriend raises a whole host of ethical questions," says Republican National Committee head Michael Steele.

Look, I’m all for ethical standards, and obviously this raises many eyebrows. But it also reveals a nasty habit of denying the intellect, experience, or merit belonging to the sexual partner of someone in power. There seems to be the impression that Hanes is a piece of ass totally unqualified for the position, and that Baucus nominated her in lieu of shelling out for concert tickets or a tennis bracelet. The phrase “staff-member girlfriend” makes it sound like she earned her taxpayer-funded paycheck by providing back rubs and listening to Baucus talk about his day.

In fact, “girlfriend” is not Hanes’s primary identity. (Nor, anymore, is “staff member”; she resigned from her job as state director as the relationship became more serious.) As Baucus's office points out, she’s an expert on child-abuse prosecution, and has tried more than 100 jury trials. Want to find out more? Good luck. Googling “Melodee Hanes” turns up mostly link bait and pilfered photos—the same treatment given to the women who claim to have slept with Tiger Woods.  

So sexual partner to a senator has now supplanted the rest of Hanes's identity. And the reaction from many is that she should have given up her ambitions as soon as she snagged a high-powered beau. Instead, Hanes sought a position for which she was a qualified candidate. Baucus, it appears, treated her application as such.

Before he submitted the list of three names to the President, Baucus submitted six names, including Hanes, to an separate reviewer (and Baucus supporter). That reviewer narrowed the list down to three, which Baucus then passed onto the president without ranking his choices. At no point did he disclose his relationship with Hanes.

According to The Wall Street Journal, ethics lawyers say that was the right move. The backlash to his secrecy seems to prove that point. Would revealing the relationship have caused the position of “companion to the senator” to jump to the top of her résumé, devaluing the rest of her experience? Would she have made it to the next round, or been instantly cut due to fears of impropriety? Her merits were enough to get her past the reviewer—but had she been labled as “girlfriend,” would people have questioned whether it was her skills or her connections that made that happen?

People dating those in power often don’t get more breaks. Instead, they get accusing glances from co-workers, extreme scrutiny of their work, and the unfair assumption that all their talent must be centered between their legs, not their ears.  

That’s too bad, because here’s the reality: smart, ambitious people are attracted to other smart, ambitious people, often in the same field. And sometimes, the best person for the job also happens to be the person on the other side of the bed. Once you get to a certain professional level, the pools of both qualified candidates and qualified paramours gets smaller, and they often overlap. And in Helena, Mont., you have to imagine that the pool is very small indeed.

In a perfect world, we would never date people from work. And in that perfect world, 18 percent of couples would not exist. In the real world, there are all kinds of ethically ambiguous, perfectly happy relationships between two powerful figures—Anne Applebaum and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski come to mind, as do Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former president Bill Clinton. And while there are plenty of examples of the boss sleeping with a less-qualified underling and showering upon him or her undeserved promotions and responsibilities, it's a mistake to assume that everyone with a powerful boyfriend is nothing more than his personal pet. And it's a bigger mistake to deny someone her intellect and agency just because she has a big-name beau.