Labor nominee Chavez withdraws, blames 'search-and-destroy' politics

Chavez allowed that she should have been more candid about the circumstances surrounding Marta Mercado, the Guatemalan woman who lived with her for about two years in the early 1990s. But she said it was "the politics of personal destruction" that brought down her nomination.

"So long as the game in Washington is a game of search-and-destroy, I think we will have very few people who are willing to do what I did, which was to put myself through this in order to serve," she said. "What has happened over the last few days is quite typical of what happens in Washington, D.C."

Over the weekend, questions arose about whether Chavez had paid Mercado for the jobs she did around the house and whether she knew Mercado was in the country illegally.

"I think I always knew that she was here illegally," Chavez said Tuesday. "I don't check green cards when I see a woman who is battered and who has no place to live and nothing to eat and no way to get on her feet."

But as recently as Sunday, Bush aides said, she had told them she did not know Mercado's legal status until after she moved out, and they repeated that to reporters. Mercado, meanwhile, was saying publicly that Chavez did in fact know.

Asked whether she told Bush aides the full story, Chavez said she did eventually: "I did not volunteer it in our very first conversation."

Chavez began her news conference with testimonials from people who said that she had helped them at various times in their lives. She said she had had difficult times during her childhood and there were always people there to help.

"And I vowed to myself that, no matter what happened to me in my life, that I would be there for other people," she said.

She described Mercado as a woman "who came from a very abusive relationship, who fled Guatemala at a time of turmoil in that country, who landed in the United States knowing no one and having no friends and having no place to live and no way to support herself."

Chavez said a friend introduced them and asked her to take Mercado in.

"I did that even at the time knowing that there was some risk to me," she said, adding: "If I was asked by a friend to do that again, I would do it in an instant, without hesitation.

Union leaders and some Democrats were already gearing up to try and defeat Chavez's nomination before the immigrant story broke, concerned about her strongly conservative positions and background, including opposition to affirmative action and raising the minimum wage.<