The Fight for Justice

So

you fought a long and painful battle to become President of the U.S., and it will soon, at last, be Inauguration Day. The Bible your dad used is back for the swearing in, 16,000 yellow roses, 500 lbs. of peach cobbler, tons of fireworks and Ricky Martin are all being readied for the gala celebrations, and you have only yourself to blame if all people remember from this historic week is the historically ugly struggle you ignited in the halls of the U.S. Senate. George W. Bush says he picked John Ashcroft, his nominee to become Attorney General, because Ashcroft is "a good man...a good attorney." Both in public and in private the Bush team is confident he will be confirmed. But the team can only begin to calculate the cost. Ashcroft's nomination has become the latest battle in America's Forty Years' War, a fight over race and culture and politics that runs from the civil rights movement to the Clarence Thomas hearings to the showdown in Tallahassee that gave Bush his presidency in a way that left many black Americans feeling that their voices and their votes did not count. Now the President who promised to be a uniter, not a divider, faces opposition to Ashcroft from virtually every liberal interest group: feminists, greens, gay-rights and gun-control advocates and, above all, civil rights organizations that charge Ashcroft with exploiting race for political gain throughout his career.

And that means that the President-elect, who told TIME several weeks ago that the greatest misconception about him is that he is racially insensitive, is now defending a key nominee in a fight so fierce it may once again be hard to tell the difference between winning and losing. There are Democrats publicly denouncing Ashcroft and privately praying he survives, so they can raise money and inflame partisans for years to come. There are Republicans publicly pledging their support and privately wondering why Bush chose a man who all but guaranteed that the era of good feeling would be over before his presidency even begins.

Is it possible that Bush did not see this coming? He told friends he thought Ashcroft would sail through because the Senate protects its own, the Republicans would support whatever a new President wanted, and Ashcroft believed he had the Democrats under control. It is true that Bush spent many days and nights of the Florida war down at his ranch with the TV off and the radio turned down. Was that cool detachment, as his aides claimed, or does he perhaps not see the depth of the wounds he is so confident he can heal?

Bush said last week he had talked at length with Ashcroft, especially about civil rights, and was convinced of his integrity and his fairness. They are in some ways kindred spirits, though Bush came late to the values Ashcroft has always held. Sources tell TIME that Bush was thinking about Ashcroft as a possible Attorney General as early as March 1998--a full year before Bush admitted he was running for President. (Bush didn't know him well, but Bush's father did--and had even considered him for Attorney General in 1991.) Bush has mentioned Ashcroft in sentences that also include the words Supreme Court. "I like him not only because he's a born-again Christian," Bush told a friend, "but because he's a Governor. He knows how to compromise."

But does he? Ashcroft is also a man who said there are two things you find in the middle of the road: "a moderate and a dead skunk. And I don't want to be either one of those." To his conservative allies, he is St. John the Divine; to opponents, all the talk of his integrity and personal grace masks a record from deep right field. But Ashcroft is also more complicated than the cartoons suggest. If he is so polarizing, how was he elected five times in a swing state? Is he the libertarian who fought alongside liberals to keep the government from prying into encrypted computer files or the bedroom policeman who opposed an ambassadorial candidate on the grounds that he was openly gay? Personally abstemious, he banned alcohol from the Governor's mansion during his eight years in office and vetoed a bill allowing Sunday alcohol sales, and yet his fifth largest campaign contributor was Anheuser-Busch. He has worked fervently to outlaw all abortions unless the mother's life is at risk, and yet his website touts his record and priorities as Governor and Senator and makes no mention whatsoever of abortion. What do you make of a man who is caricatured as Cotton Mather but who is known among his friends for his gospel singing, piano playing, his love of dirt bikes and his ability to spear a carp on a 12-ft. pole? What do you make of a man who has in his barn a 7-ft. statue he crafted of the Statue of Liberty? He made it of barbed wire.

Ashcroft grew up in rural Springfield, Mo., a green and rolling part of the state that has voted Republican since the Civil War. Back when Missouri sent 10 Democrats to Congress, Springfield was the lone Republican holdout. It was free-labor, antiunion territory, with antislave, Bible-belt, mountain people. Young John was the middle son of a renowned Pentecostal educator and minister. His was a strict and loving household, childhood friends say, where smoking, drinking and dancing were forbidden, and Sundays were for prayer and study, not work or play. When John was a teenager, he and his brother Wesley used to spend weekends at their family's cabin on the Lake of the Ozarks. John would always say to his brother, "Wes, what is our objective for the weekend?" It had to be something they had never done before, like water-ski on one ski or barefoot or on canoe paddles. "John was never satisfied until he got it perfected," says his old baby-sitter Norma Champion.