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Ashcroft haters

To get a sense of Attorney General John Ashcroft's unpopularity in certain circles, "all you had to do was listen to the leading Democratic presidential contenders in Iowa last week," writes USA Today political columnist Walter Shapiro.

"For a Democrat craving an applause line, a denunciation of Ashcroft even tops a snarky reference to his boss, George W. Bush," Mr. Shapiro said.

"In a back yard in Indianola, Richard Gephardt announced, 'When I'm president, we will have an attorney general ... ' and interrupted himself midthought to add, 'And he won't be John Ashcroft, I can tell you that.' At a tiny library in rural New Hartford, Howard Dean declared, 'John Ashcroft is too busy snooping through the public libraries to enforce the country's antitrust laws.' ...

"But the Democrat who devotes the most energy and passion to challenging the Ashcroft record is John Edwards," the columnist said.

In the town of Waverly, Mr. Edwards told a crowd, "I want to say this loud and clear: We cannot in this effort to fight this war on terrorism allow people like John Ashcroft to take away our rights, our freedoms."

Bush haters

"Whatever else may be said about the base of the Democratic Party, it most definitely is upset with President Bush," Terry Eastland writes in the Dallas Morning News.

"Democratic pollster Geoff Garin says that in his 25 years of polling, he never has seen Democrats so angry with a Republican president. Veteran columnist Robert Novak writes that he hasn't seen such 'pure hatred' on the part of Democrats toward a Republican president in his 44 years of campaign watching," said Mr. Eastland, publisher of the Weekly Standard, which reprinted the column at its Web site (www.weeklystandard.com).