TWO WEEKS AGO, the largest coalition of activist groups ever assembled declared holy war on George W. Bush’s attorney-general nominee, former Missouri senator John Ashcroft — arch-conservative, abortion foe, and Assemblies of God congregant. The campaign flouted American constitutional practice. Since 1789, only nine cabinet nominees have been rejected in the Senate, and none for ideological reasons in an incoming administration. No matter: Led by People for the American Way, the NAACP, and the National Abortion Rights Action League, literally hundreds of the best-funded and best-trained pressure groups in the country began combing through Ashcroft’s record to paint him as an extremist, particularly on matters of abortion and race.
In hearings, Ashcroft gave them all the ammunition they could have wanted. He neither swallowed his words nor muddied his positions, defending himself with more-than-necessary candor and elaborating on his answers even where he wasn’t asked to. He even refused to rule out the possibility he would visit Bob Jones University again. Yet, by the end of the first day of testimony, the anti-Ashcroft forces looked as if they had seriously overplayed their hand — and by the end of hearings last Friday, the Ashcroft story had dropped off the front page. It was a humiliating defeat, and one that threatens to set a pattern.
Paradoxically, Ashcroft opponents got little effect out of their strongest point — the nominee’s hard-line stand on abortion, which he shares with only about one American in eight. True, a flustered Ashcroft wandered from his talking points and described Roe v. Wade as “settled law.” But otherwise, so unambiguous was his pro-life stance that there was little to discuss.
And once the anti-Ashcroft activists got off abortion and onto race, they went seriously astray. Those Democrats who assumed a link between Ashcroft’s religious practices and the American race problem were operating out of ignorance, barking up the wrong tree. Pentecostalism — at least as it’s practiced in the Assemblies of God, to which Ashcroft belongs — is Methodist-influenced Christianity with an overlay of African religion. It has its roots in the Los Angeles revivals held by the black Texas minister William Seymour in the first decade of the century. The Assemblies of God repudiated the Ku Klux Klan in 1925 as “un-Christian and un-American,” and integration has been the rule rather than the exception among Pentecostal faiths. Pentecostalism, according to historians, has a better claim than jazz to be called the first major black influence on (white) American middle-class life.
California’s Barbara Boxer, the first Senate Democrat to openly declare her opposition, typified the confusion. Asked whether she thinks Ashcroft a racist, Boxer replied, “I never use that word against anyone” — implicitly confirming Republican suspicions that the word, as used by Democrats, had lost all its descriptive power and turned into a mere epithet. “I don’t think he’s a racist,” New York senator Charles Schumer said, “but at certain instances, I don’t think he’s shown enough sensitivity toward America’s long and troubled history with race.” This is an extraordinary statement, boiling down to the intolerant and illogical assertion that one should vote against Ashcroft because he didn’t care enough that ignorant bigots who knew nothing of his record might slander him. Even “moderate” Indiana senator Evan Bayh, admitting in an op-ed that Ashcroft is “no racist and no monster,” announced that he would vote against the senator anyway, on the grounds that Ashcroft would “encourage in others the unyielding extremism they perceive in him.” This is an attitude — yield to the prejudice, rather than correct the misperception — that ought to horrify the very minorities Bayh claims to speak for.
Unable to sully Ashcroft as a racist, Democratic senators turned to the issues, with catastrophic results. Exhibit A was Ashcroft’s leading role in rejecting the federal court nomination of black Missouri judge Ronnie White. True, this wasn’t Ashcroft’s finest hour. It can be argued (the New Republic did so convincingly in 1999) that Ashcroft’s opposition had less to do with the merits of the case than with Missouri politics. But in last week’s Senate hearings, Ashcroft won the argument over the merits, too. Was Ashcroft right to urge capital punishment for the quadruple murderer James Johnson (who had traveled to the house of one sheriff’s deputy and shot his wife to death in front of her Bible-study group)? Or was White correct to urge that Johnson’s case be remanded to the court on a technicality?
The same pattern played out with Exhibit B: Ashcroft’s role in vigorously defending the state of Missouri against lawsuits filed by the cities of St. Louis and Kansas City two decades ago in order to increase school desegregation initiatives. It’s true Ashcroft had tried to fudge exactly what he did in that litigation, and that he had been disingenuous in claiming his objections had to do with the expense of such programs. But one man’s desegregation is another man’s forced busing. The lawsuits came just five years after Boston’s public school system had been spectacularly destroyed on national television (and segregation there increased) by court ordered busing. Was Ashcroft right to drag his feet? Or was Ted Kennedy right in urging that St. Louis’s schools be similarly dismantled?
Incredibly, Democrats were dragging the national policy debate back onto the very terrain where they’d been drubbed from one end of the Reagan administration to the other. The hearings revealed a party unable to keep its centrist bearings without its centrist president. The transition is clearly so subtle that Democratic politicians themselves haven’t noticed it. In the Clinton era, Democrats spoke for black America. Last week, as in the Reagan era, Democrats seemed to speak only for black America. Dick Durbin, perhaps Ashcroft’s most out-spoken Senate foe, spoke for many when he shouted at an interviewer: “Do you realize what’s at stake here? It’s a question about who will be attorney general of the United States, who will be in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, one of the most important in Washington.” Ted Kennedy, in a moment of Gingrichian hubris, even threatened to shut down the Senate with an unprecedented filibuster. And Missouri Democrat Jean Carnahan, who replaced Ashcroft in the Senate, was forced to explain why she’d be reluctant to join her Massachusetts colleague: “I think a freshman senator,” Carnahan said, “would be unwise to filibuster before she had even cast her first vote.”
Former labor secretary Robert Reich said, “George W. Bush is going to rue the day that he nominated Ashcroft, because there is going to be a terrific, ongoing set of concerns, a brouhaha.” No, there isn’t. These are an antiquated set of concerns — either discredited Democratic programs, like busing; or secure ones, like abortion rights, which Republicans are looking for any excuse not to touch.
During a Senate majority that lasted just 17 days, Democrats managed to commit an act of partisan overreach that could dog them for years. It’s worth remembering that the missteps that destroyed the Republican Revolution in the aftermath of the 1994 elections were also offensive blunders. If Republicans — particularly the party’s religious Right — wound up cast as radicals in the mid-1990s, it’s because they were too zealous themselves in their efforts to cast “McGovernik” Democrats as radicals. George Bush got the Republican nomination because he understood the pitfalls of such ideological character assassination, and there are few politicians more attuned to taking advantage of such miscues when the other side commits them. When Barbara Walters asked Bush if he had really expected Ashcroft to be such a lightning rod, Bush replied, “Yes, I did. . . . I know there’s a lot of people out there hollering, mainly voices of special interests in Washington. That’s what they’re paid to do.” He’s not just astute: He’s right. Like the Christian Coalition before them, NARAL, NOW, and the NAACP were willing to strip their party of its centrist camouflage in order to increase their own direct-mail fund-raising.
George W. Bush is still battered from a close election, and hemmed in by slim majorities in both houses of Congress. But the Left’s paranoid reaction to the Ashcroft nomination has changed things. It has locked down Bush’s right-wing base for at least one, and perhaps two, congressional elections. That frees Bush to govern from the center, which is the only place he’s comfortable governing from anyway. Republicans a half-decade ago were simultaneously mystified and infuriated that Clinton could win in the suburbs by passing welfare reform, holding the line on taxes, and fighting the war on drugs — and increase his support on the left wing of his party. In like fashion, Democrats, lulled by their low opinion of Bush’s IQ and narrow congressional mandate, may soon wake up to a president they’ve inadvertently rendered powerful and not know what hit them.
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
