John Ashcroft's power grab: The saga of a troubled—and troubling—attorney general

Reason, June, 2002 by Brian Doherty

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 rim 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.