12/20/01 2:55 p.m.
The Decoy
Ashcroft is not the target.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

he Left’s reaction to President-elect George W. Bush’s nomination of John Ashcroft as attorney general has been nothing short of hysterical. It would seem that the good people of Missouri have elected a racist abortion-clinic bomber to statewide office five times.

This is ridiculous, of course. Ashcroft is strongly pro-life — a rather conventional position in Republican circles. He also fought President Clinton’s nomination of a liberal judge to the federal appeals court. Because that judge happens to be black, and because liberals choose to racialize every political squabble, Ashcroft is said to be “controversial.”

Nobody really expects the Senate to reject him. Until recently, Ashcroft was a member of that body, and senators rarely draw daggers on their own. What’s more, Ashcroft handled himself with great dignity following his defeat in November — a defeat he might easily have challenged. Yet he displayed the humility and grace Al Gore never seemed to find in himself.

So why has the Left embarked on this kamikaze mission? Because it isn’t aiming at Ashcroft. Instead, it wants to affect the selection of Ashcroft’s team — especially the head of the Department of Justice’s civil-rights division. The price of an attorney general who once said something nice about Robert E. Lee should be a deputy who thinks like Bill Lann Lee. That’s the logic.

The DOJ’s civil-rights chief is one of the most explosively controversial posts in the whole federal government. The first rule for picking a nominee is the same as the first rule for picking a running mate: Do no harm. Clinton is a case in point here. In 1993, he chose Lani Guinier, and then suffered the embarrassment of pulling her name because people started reading her law-review articles. The president later settled on Bill Lann Lee, and encountered more trouble. The Senate found him too liberal to confirm, and Clinton had to resort to an underhanded method of recess appointment to put Lee at his desk.

The Left must hope that the “do no harm” dictum will compel Bush to pick a pliable sort of Republican, a limp-wristed guilty conscience who sees lots of enemies to his right. Bush should avoid this, if only because he’ll get no credit for moderation anyway. Bush displayed excellent instincts on his choice of Ashcroft. A month or two from now, when he considers filling the civil-rights job, these same instincts should guide him toward another principled conservative.