Confirmation Bear Traps

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Which has, of course, already begun. Bush is proving to be a uniter, not a divider, all right. But nobody realized that it was Democrats he would be uniting--environmentalists, pro-choice advocates, labor unions and civil rights groups, all of which were huddling together last Friday to pick their targets and plan their attacks. "This kind of outrage in breadth and depth and diversity--I can't remember anything like it," said Hilary Shelton, director of the N.A.A.C.P.'s Washington bureau. But in private, Senate Democrats were clear that, absent some shocking new smoking gun, they weren't likely to actually reject Ashcroft, Chavez or Norton. In a Senate divided evenly between the parties, only a simple majority is required for confirmation, meaning that Democrats would have to achieve astonishing unity (and find one Republican defector) to vote down one of the nominees.

The Democrats' strategy is not risk-free; if they fight hard and lose, they might end up empowering the new President. And with three, possibly four, targets, "they're going to spread themselves too thin," predicts Clint Bolick, a Chavez ally who is head of a conservative legal-advocacy group called the Institute for Justice. "They're not going to take a single scalp because they're going to go after too many."

But Republicans know that some of the nominations might prove costly. Bush's choice of Chavez, with her record of union bashing, means that "we have just blown up whatever inroads we had made with the Teamsters," says a seasoned G.O.P. strategist. Teamsters leader James Hoffa has been flirting with bolting from the Democratic Party and seemed receptive to g.o.p. stroking, but Chavez is a bitter pill for even him to swallow. And thanks to Norton, a longtime advocate for oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, the strategist says, "we are also now undone with suburban women in the Midwest and California who care about the environment." Other Bush allies complain that by picking Ashcroft, a candidate to lead the Justice Department who offends the African-American community's sense of justice, Bush handed the other side a sure weapon to increase black turnout in 2002 and 2004.

When Bush tapped Ashcroft, on the Friday before Christmas, the former Missouri Senator wasted no time; he got on the phone and began tracking down his Senate colleagues at home. The teetotaling son of a famed Pentecostal minister, Ashcroft, a onetime Missouri Governor so strict that he refused to dance at his own inaugural ball, is the kind of hard-line conservative who makes liberal toes curl. Yet as he reached Senate Democrats like Russ Feingold and his old Yale classmate Joe Lieberman, he was able to elicit warm responses, or at least pledges of neutrality. Feingold called him a "respected public servant with a fine legal mind." New Jersey Democrat Bob Torricelli called him "a very good choice," praised his "sound judgment and high integrity" and said he favored his confirmation.