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Larry Thompson becomes John Ashcroft's top deputy at the Department
of Justice, the Left may claim that its
unseemly
jihad against the attorney general has paid dividends. But make
no mistake: Thompson is a conservative, and he is well liked by
many conservatives who knew him when he was a district attorney
in Georgia. If Bush nominates Thompson, conservatives will support
him.
Yet he's apparently a bit soft on the question of racial preferences.
Thompson, who is black, resigned from the legal advisory board of
the Southeastern Legal Foundation in 1999, right before SLF filed
a lawsuit against the city of Atlanta's set-aside contracting program.
"I believe he supports affirmative action for hiring purposes,"
says SLF president Lynn Hogue, who served with Thompson on the board.
"But there's no question about whether he's a conservative. Nobody
on our board is not a conservative. We're not interested in having
fifth-columnists drawing us off our mission."
Thompson was on the SLF board when it decided to sue the Census
Bureau over sampling. It also took Gary Aldrich as a client when
Aldrich believed the Clinton administration was trying to block
the publication of the book he wrote on his experiences as a FBI
agent.
There is every reason to believe Thompson would be a strong candidate
for deputy attorney general even if the Left had not made sacking
Ashcroft a priority. Then again, the Washington Post's headline
on the front page yesterday — "Atlanta Lawyer Likely Pick for
Ashcroft Deputy: Move Aimed at Countering Criticism on Racial Issues"
— suggests that Thompson is a candidate precisely because of
his less-than-conservative views on racial preferences.
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