Inside Politics

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).

“The Democratic activists who dominate the party’s presidential primaries will pick the nominee. So, it isn’t surprising that Howard Dean has become the front-runner by tapping their anger — nor that the other candidates are copying him.

“The case being made against Bush is that, on matters both foreign and domestic, he misleads if he doesn’t intentionally lie and that his presidency endangers not terrorists, but law-abiding Americans. That is a harsh indictment that, while pleasing to the base, has yet to appeal to voters in the middle who don’t share the Democratic hatred toward Bush and don’t regard his presidency as a continuous act of deception designed to destroy America.

“Maybe the Democrats — and their eventual nominee in particular — will offer a more credible critique of Bush. Maybe, having undergone an attitude adjustment, they will be able to appeal to independent voters. On the other hand, the Democrats may be in a place from which they can’t easily escape.”

ABA priorities

“How many lawyers does it take to protect American soldiers in Iraq from indictment on ‘war crimes’ charges in European courts?” the Wall Street Journal asks.

Story Continues →