John Ashcroft's Power Grab

The saga of a troubled -- and troubling -- attorney general.

Brian Doherty from the June 2002 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Ashcroft did win something important during his Missouri days, though: a couple of powerful national enemies in the civil rights and women's lobbies. Eventually they would help make his confirmation process for U.S. attorney general so grueling (and so amusing to read about). Accusations of racism have stalked Ashcroft from his days as Missouri's attorney general, when he fought a court-imposed school integration plan -- not out of any racist intention, he insisted, but because it placed an unfair tax burden on the people of Missouri.

If his opposition to the school plan issued from his principles, it's less clear what motivated him to block Bill Clinton's appointment of the black Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ronnie White to a federal judgeship. Ashcroft advanced inchoate feelings that White just might be too "activist" and got the entire GOP to go along with him by spreading misleading accounts of White's being soft on capital punishment. In reality, Judge White had voted to uphold death penalty convictions 41 out of 59 times, and almost always voted with the panel majority. So at the very least, there was rank demagoguery behind Ashcroft's campaign against the judge. Speaking at the anti-race-mixing Bob Jones University and giving an interview to the Confederate fan magazine Southern Partisan -- which he praised for trying to convince Americans that the Confederates were not "giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda" -- didn't help Ashcroft's reputation with the civil rights cognoscenti either.

In attempting to deflect accusations of racism, Ashcroft's goofy, hapless

Dagwood Bumstead persona comes to the fore. He assures readers of his memoir that his father possessed "the foresight to prevent his son's prejudices at an early age" by playing him Mahalia Jackson records and making him read the left-wing black novelist Richard Wright (while not, Ashcroft assures us, "subscrib[ing] to everything Wright advocated"). A further sign of the Ashcroft family's progressive stance on race is that his parents let black guests rake leaves in the backyard -- just as they would any other visitor.

The women's movement has had it in for Ashcroft since he came up with a startling antitrust innovation in the late '70s. As Missouri's attorney general, he sued the National Organization for Women because they were leading a boycott of the state over its failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. The boycott, Ashcroft argued, was a "restraint of trade." Get it? The judge didn't either. Ashcroft lost.

His steadfast rhetorical objection to abortion (except to save the life of the mother) and some restrictions on it he either passed or advocated in Missouri (he wanted to completely ban second abortions, for instance) have also made him a women's movement pariah.

Yet even his enemies typically grant that there's a certain kind of basic personal integrity that we can expect from Ashcroft. He is unlikely to screw the interns, accept bribes, gamble, or, God forbid, dance. Of course, that is the least important kind of integrity to expect from a politician.

When it comes to a more substantive integrity -- devotion to core political principles -- there aren't very many important ideas that Ashcroft is solid on. He is more likely to adopt specific proposals in an ad hoc, disconnected way. He was for trade sanctions against Sudan because they don't respect religious freedom; yet he later plumped (rightly) to end the Cuban boycott (after earlier supporting it). He was foursquare against national standards for education but insists on them for drug and suicide laws.

Ultimately, Ashcroft's appeal to conservatives seems to be rooted more in his persona and his religiosity than actual conservative legislative achievements. And that appeal has proven pretty thin outside Missouri. Although he won with 64 percent of the vote in his second gubernatorial race and swept every county in his first Senate race, Ashcroft was a nobody on the national stage until Bush tapped him for attorney general. Dating back to the first Reagan administration, Ashcroft had been a perpetual name floating up as someone who just might be named attorney general in a Republican administration. Similarly, he was a prominent might-have-been vice presidential candidate for Bob Dole in '96. He ran hard for president through most of '97 and '98 in that "just looking" way, rousing much excitement among the likes of Pat Robertson. But he eventually acknowledged in January 1999 that the support wasn't there.

It hadn't been there earlier in the decade, either, when Ashcroft made a spectacularly weak run for chairman of the Republican National Committee. He'd been term-limited out of the Missouri state house in '93 and was cooling his heels before he could run for Senate in '94. Despite having far and away the most prominent political experience of any of the candidates for chairman, Ashcroft came in third on the first ballot, behind Haley Barbour (then just a former Reagan aide) and current Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham (then just a former Dan Quayle aide). He was so despondent at his loss that he avoided the traditional stand-on-the-dais-together unity display.

Later, even his home state let him down. In 2000, Ashcroft famously suffered what is surely one of the most humiliating political defeats in American history. Not only did he fail to get re-elected to the Senate -- something 80 percent of incumbents pull off -- but he lost to a dead man, Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan. What made the loss all the more dramatic was the longtime rivalry between Ashcroft and Carnahan, who had been lieutenant governor when Ashcroft was Missouri's chief executive.

Bad blood between them flowed long and deep, from the days when Ashcroft went to court to establish that he didn't cede power to his lieutenant every time he left the state. Ashcroft even pettily ended the practice of paying Carnahan a pro-rated higher salary on days Ashcroft was absent. Their Senate election was bitter and mean: If Carnahan tried to insinuate Ashcroft had a race problem, John's boys would distribute old photos of Carnahan in blackface. The Show Me State, indeed.

Then, less than a month before the election, Carnahan's plane crashed, killing the governor, his eldest son, and a trusted aide. When the person who wins Senate elections in Missouri can't serve, the governor -- in this case, Democrat Roger Wilson -- appoints someone to the vacancy until the next election. Wilson made it clear that he would choose the grieving widow and mother, Jean Carnahan. In the pollster's argot, the late Mel suddenly had no negatives and Jean's mere ability to stride in public purposefully with the ghosts of husband and son hovering nearby was enough to dig Ashcroft's political grave.

There Ashcroft was, then -- a small-account politician of no particular achievement or rigor from a difficult little state, repudiated on the national stage and suffering a uniquely stinging political defeat. Yet Ashcroft gallantly chose not to challenge the election, though he had various procedural tacks he could have taken. In his highly praised concession speech, Ashcroft said that "the will of the people has been expressed with compassion" and that he "hope[s] that the outcome"is a matter of comfort to Mrs. Carnahan."

However tough that loss must have been, it must have been even more bruising when, a few months later, the new Sen. Carnahan voted against Ashcroft for attorney general. Mr. Dithers couldn't have humiliated poor, hapless Dagwood any better.