THE ANSWER LADY

By MARGARET CARLSON

AS ONE-WOMAN SHOWS GO, UTAH CONGRESSWOMAN Enid Waldholtz's five-hour press conference last week will be hard to top. She borrowed heavily from past performers--Richard Nixon (my mother was "a saint"), Mayor Marion Barry (the "bitch set me up") and Senator Bob Packwood ("I was a binge drinker")--and fashioned her own revue. Her wealthy father, "the finest man I know," inconveniently remembers the $2 million that went to her 1994 campaign as a loan (there is a $1,000 limit), but that's because his memory is not so good. Anyone would have been fooled by Joe Waldholtz, her "teddy bear" husband who took in stray dogs, fixed meals for sick friends and called his mother every day. And those pain-killers she needed after her caesarean section kept her from answering questions sooner. All these justifications were marinated in copious tears and stirred slowly until everyone but her was numb. The ordeal set a record in the talk-till-they-drop genre of damage control, easily exceeding the 90-minute event held by Geraldine Ferraro. Afterward, slightly more people believed Waldholtz than before, demonstrating that the myth of women as frail and financially inept persists--even if, like Enid, they have spent their careers untangling complicated commercial transactions.

There was a theme in this pudding of words, however muddled: Look at me, poor Enid, fooled by Joe like so many others. Indeed, Joe scammed Enid and her father in the end (for $2 million more than went into her campaign), but that doesn't mean that she wasn't, in the beginning, a knowing beneficiary of the con artist--who knows an easy mark is someone with a smidgen of larceny in her heart. It was Enid who originally employed the "millionaire's loophole" in 1992, before she ever married Joe. Calling on a technique that figured prominently in her campaign-finance course at Brigham Young University, Enid used $150,000 of her father's money by selling back to him a house he had given her. In '94 she needed millions, so Joe had to launder more of Daddy's money with a convoluted asset swap. The only difference is that those assets, Joe's family trusts, didn't exist. Enid admitted last week that she had lied about the transaction during the campaign, insisting that the windfall came from hard work and being otherwise "blessed." But she did so only because the truth was "too complex" for voters to understand.

Waldholtz is clearly hoping that Enid as victimizer--she admitted she won with "tainted money," but she "can't give an election back" because it would deprive Utah residents of their voice--was pushed offstage by Enid the victim. (And by the way, she revealed, Joe has made some "questionable life-style choices'' that make him unfit to share custody of their daughter.) Certainly, she's in a fix, having to hire lawyers, perhaps pay more than $1 million in campaign fines, and support herself. She's been behind on the $3,800 monthly rent for her Georgetown home. Although she showed moxie by turning her baby shower into a $500-a-head fund raiser, it won't be easy raising her child as a single mother and possibly former Congresswoman. Once you've told the world that you're "as stupid, as blind, as gullible, as naive" as a human being could be--and confessed that you can't even run the answering machine in your own house--it's hard to argue that you should be snipping away at the nation's budget.