Ashcroft with Horns: This is dedicated to the one they hate - attorney general John Ashcroft's public relations

National Review, March 25, 2002 by Jay Nordlinger

After Sept. 11, everything changed, they say -- and many things did. The dominant press took a new look at the administration. President Bush -- formerly a clueless frat boy -- was okay. Donald Rumsfeld -- once a Ford-era caveman -- was okay too. And Colin Powell, who'd never been not-okay, was even more okay than ever.

But John Ashcroft, the attorney general? Definitely not okay -- in fact, something of a terror. Ashcroft bore the brunt of the liberals' fury, or confusion. Even some of the liberals themselves will admit that 9/11 was a disorienting event for them. Everything had been upset. "National security" was no longer a Republican buzz phrase, meant to bloat the defense budget. "The American way of life" was no longer a piece of cheap oratory, fed to simpletons. And the notion of "good and evil" was suddenly plausible.

It could be that the Left needed something to hold on to: something familiar and comforting; something "9/10." And that something was, to a degree, John Ashcroft as devil figure: Ashcroft as threat to the Constitution, as enemy of civil liberties, as representative of dark, religious impulses in the land -- impulses liable to run wild under a genuine foreign attack. It was almost as if, after the planes got through destroying all those people, many said, "The terrorists must be stopped, I grant you. But John Ashcroft must be stopped too!" It would be Scoundrel Time all over again, this time led by a Christian conservative from Missouri.

Indeed, "McCarthy" and "Hoover" (as in J. Edgar) were heard frequently in reference to Ashcroft. The least that critics call him is "extremist." It's also widely alleged that Ashcroft is "scary" -- "the scariest man in government," wrote the Washington Post's Richard Cohen. Al Hunt, in the Wall Street Journal, said, "Sept. 11 has enabled John Ashcroft to be John Ashcroft. That's a scary spectacle."

It was Anthony Lewis of the New York Times who best summed up the deepest liberal opinion about Ashcroft. The columnist was retiring after 50 years with the Times, and the paper did a farewell interview with him, at the end of last year. What had he learned? First, said Lewis, "certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft." It has come to that: There are circles in which easy comparisons can be made between bin Laden and Ashcroft, with no raised eyebrows.

John Ashcroft will never be a liberal darling, that's for sure. He is liked -- even loved -- by his own, but he doesn't go out of his way to make himself respectable to elite opinion. He has not "grown" in office -- which is to say (sarcastically) that he hasn't moderated his positions. As a conservative Christian, he is easy to mock as an anti-dancing Elmer Gantry. Liberals go after Ashcroft in the same way they went after Kenneth Starr. Back in Lewinsky times, James Carville sneered, "[Starr] goes down by the Potomac and listens to hymns, as the cleansing water of the Potomac goes by . . ." Ashcroft's even worse: He sings hymns in public (about which, more later).

The attorney general has managed to enter the culture. Consider just a couple of offbeat items: The New York Times Magazine ran a spread on an eclectic gallery in L.A. It included a photo of an African coffin on which Ashcroft's face has been painted. The gallery owner explained to me that Ashcroft was to be the death of affirmative action, Roe vs. Wade, and so on. Item No. 2? At a major Washington, D.C., synagogue, Ashcroft figured in a "Purim spiel": He was equated with Haman, a figure of extreme danger -- of mass murder -- to Jews. Traditionally, Hitler, say, would be equated with Haman.

One veteran Washington reporter -- not particularly partisan -- shakes his head: "The depth of the hatred that certain liberals have for Ashcroft is hard to fathom. It doesn't seem logical, even given all of Ashcroft's conservative views. It's like a prejudice, it's visceral. There's some Ashcroft mooma-jooma -- some mo-jo, some karma, some vibe -- that drives liberals nuts. It makes otherwise sane people say crazy things."

It seems clear that Ashcroft serves, in part, as a proxy for Bush: that is, liberals and Democrats generally have had to lay off Bush, owing to his popularity and his standing as commander in chief. But they need someone on whom to vent their frustration: and that's Ashcroft. He may not like it, but he does Bush the favor of being the administration's lightning rod, its big fat target.

For someone who's supposed to be scary and extreme, John Ashcroft has done awfully well with the public. In Missouri -- one of America's great swing states -- he was elected attorney general twice, governor twice, and U.S. senator once. When he was state AG, he was chosen by his peers to be chairman of the National Association of Attorneys General. When he was governor, he was again chosen by his peers, to be chairman of the National Governors Association. As one Ashcroft-watcher maintains, "That's a remarkable fact. These groups contain some of the most ambitious, most cut-throat people in the country. They're pits of vipers. And for those people -- both Republicans and Democrats -- to settle on Ashcroft as their leader is extraordinary."