http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/4/green-j.html
How Ashcroft Happened
Joshua Green
If all had gone according to George W. Bush's original plan, Marc Racicot
would today be our attorney general. Racicot, who was, until recently,
governor of Montana, would have been a solid choice. Though he's enough of a
GOP loyalist to satisfy the party faithful (he earned his partisan spurs
working on Bush's behalf during the Florida recount), he is moderate enough
to have pleased the suburban voters who turned out for Bush based on his
claim to be a "uniter, not a divider." At one point recently, Racicot had the
highest approval rating--87 percent--of any governor in the country. Liberal
groups still might have opposed Racicot based on his official stance against
abortion, for example, but he would not have been a provocation to them. John
Ashcroft, on the other hand, is a brazen provocation: He's a hard-core
conservative on race, civil rights, abortion, and a host of other issues. As
is by now quite well known, he has a history of blocking African-American
judicial appointments and making controversial comments about the
Confederacy. Racicot may not be as liberal as a northern Republican like
Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, but he and Ashcroft hail from opposite wings
of the Republican Party. So why did Ashcroft supplant Racicot? Shouldn't
Bush, as a new president with a shaky claim to legitimacy and a desire to be
perceived as moderate, have gone for the less controversial choice? Lost in
all the brouhaha over Ashcroft's confirmation hearings is the story of how
Ashcroft came to be nominated in the first place. In that story lies a
glimpse of who is influencing the Bush administration and how they go about
it. Three days before Bush announced his nominee for attorney general, a
small group of intellectual Catholic and Protestant conservatives--unhappy
with what they perceived to be Racicot's moderate views on abortion,
homosexuality, and school choice--recruited Princeton University professor
Robert P. George to draft a paper detailing the case against Racicot. George
was ideally suited to the task. A rising conservative star who made a name
for himself defending Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearing, George
is a prominent natural-law theorist who holds Woodrow Wilson's old chair at
Princeton. He is also a staunch Roman Catholic and ardent pro-life activist;
he once penned an amicus brief for Mother Teresa asking the Supreme Court to
reverse Roe v. Wade. Furthermore, he has written extensively on the need for
conservative Catholics and Protestant evangelicals to employ "interfaith
cooperation in pursuit of operational objectives in the culture war." (By
"operational objectives," George means stopping gay rights and banning
abortion.) George's report on Racicot quickly circulated among conservatives
and made its way to Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser. Rove tried
unsuccessfully to convince the group of Racicot's conservative bona fides,
both in conference calls and in face-to-face talks. Two days after George's
report began to circulate, Racicot withdrew from consideration. "We're still
not clear what exactly happened," a spokeswoman for Racicot confided. Two
related phenomena combined to derail Racicot--and George and his fellow
conservative religious intellectuals would rather those phenomena not come to
light. The first was religious conservatives' tacit agreement to stay out of
the spotlight during Bush's presidential campaign in order not to frighten
off moderate voters, as many believe they had during the 1992 Republican
convention in Houston. The second is the decline over the past decade in the
animosity between evangelicals and Catholics, and the subsequent movement, of
which George is a prominent member, to form what he calls a "pan-orthodox
alliance" between Catholic social conservatives and evangelical Protestants
to exert greater influence over public affairs. This movement has been most
visible in the religious academic journal First Things, where George is on
the editorial advisory board. It was this group of predominantly Catholic
intellectuals (usually understood to include such people as Russell
Hittinger, Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard John Neuhaus, the
Lutheran-minister-turned-Catholic-priest who edits First Things) who were
most upset by Racicot's impending nomination. Abortion--the primary issue
uniting Catholics and evangelical conservatives--was the motivating factor.
George's patrons believed that Bush's attorney general needed to be "square"
on abortion. And though Racicot was endorsed by the National Right to Life
Committee and his official statements were well in keeping with the
conservative position on abortion, his informal comments did not meet this
standard. Also, conservatives didn't like his decision to advocate broader
hate-crime laws following the murder of Matthew Shepard in neighboring
Wyoming. The conservative intellectuals associated with this
evangelical-Catholic alliance are distinct from what is commonly considered
the religious right--an informal assemblage of conservative religious groups
that include the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, which represent
fundamentalist evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Pentecostals like Pat
Robertson, respectively. But it's clear that once George's colleagues learned
of Bush's likely choice of Racicot, they were in a unique position to thwart
it. As one prominent Catholic conservative told me, Bush "owed them" for
their crucial support during the Republican primary, when his candidacy
appeared to be in jeopardy following his decision to speak at Bob Jones
University. Quite simply, they did not yet consider the debt repaid. They
still don't--although the sacrifice of Racicot might count as an interest
payment on the principal. George's alliance is just one camp in a spectrum of
religious social conservatives who are frequently and erroneously lumped
together but often operate on their own. Such was the case with Ashcroft's
nomination. While Catholic social conservatives aborted Racicot's nomination,
they weren't responsible for Ashcroft's; he was nominated following a strong
lobbying effort from fundamentalist Protestant evangelicals. Like most social
conservatives, the Catholic intellectuals share Ashcroft's views on abortion
and gays; but his nomination wasn't a direct appeal to Catholics. And
although Bush "bought himself a lot of goodwill" across the Republican Party
with his cabinet appointments, in the words of one conservative commentator,
Catholic conservatives feel he hasn't directly addressed their concerns. Bush
is still being pressured to do so. He has already spoken individually with
several important leaders of the Church; on January 31, he met with a group
of about 35 Catholic intellectuals. This influence might pay off in Bush's
selection of a surgeon general and a director of the National Institutes of
Health. This pattern could continue. One difficulty Catholic conservatives
faced during the campaign and after the election was the lack of a visible
leader through which to leverage political power. The man who would
previously have articulated their position, Cardinal John O'Connor, died
early in the campaign. His successor, Cardinal Edward Egan, possesses the
conservative credentials to inherit that mantle, but he has not yet
established himself as O'Connor's political equal. In the interim, Catholic
intellectuals, who are always the force behind the Church's leadership,
continued to exert political influence over Bush. In fact, the very absence
of public scrutiny helped them in their cause. The success of religious
conservatives in preventing Racicot's nomination demonstrates that in this
new era of ostensible bipartisanship, a behind-the-scenes approach is more
effective than the public threats of hard-right conservatives like House
Majority Whip Tom DeLay. When DeLay boldly announced to The Washington Post
in December that Republicans would force through their agenda regardless of
the circumstances surrounding Bush's victory, both parties hurriedly
denounced his comments. DeLay's behavior, rather than pressuring Bush to the
right, alienated moderates and had the ultimate effect of burnishing the new
president's moderate credentials. Religious conservatives recognize that
their clandestine strategy requires a disciplined anonymity. Almost all of
those contacted for this article declined to be interviewed or asked that
they not be identified by name. Keeping in mind the example of DeLay, they
recognize that they're powerful insofar as they don't draw too much attention
to themselves and taint Bush as extremist. For this reason, they did not
publicize the fact that they'd sunk Racicot's nomination; indeed, they took
pains to conceal it. "The odd thing is, and this is unique to politics, when
you succeed at something like that you become more powerful," says a leading
conservative intellectual close to George. "By being quiet about it and being
successful, they're more powerful than they otherwise would have been." They
can keep Bush beholden to them, in part by maintaining such discretion. By
working with Bush under the radar, Catholic conservatives enable him to
appear free of right-wing influence. In other words, allowing Bush to
maintain the image of a "uniter" able to quell his party's extremists puts
him in the best position to govern effectively; as an effective leader, in
turn, Bush is best positioned to advance conservative religious causes. This
stealthy approach paid dividends during Ashcroft's confirmation battle.
Liberal interest groups drew attention to Ashcroft's unsettling record on
abortion, homosexuality, and race, and questioned how his religious
commitment shaped his understanding of the law. But while Ashcroft's personal
religious conservatism came under the microscope, his ties--and, by
extension, Bush's ties--to religious conservatives did not. What escaped
notice during the hearings was this obvious but significant fact: Religious
conservatives weren't just happy with Ashcroft's nomination; they were
instrumental in bringing it about. When word of George's handiwork in
blocking Racicot first appeared in The Weekly Standard, Rove frantically
called reporters and denied the story. Religious activists, after all, still
create unease among the public. Rove's furious effort to maintain Bush's
moderate front only underscores the message that conservatives who hope to
curry favor with the new president had better respect these new rules. Social
conservatives have adapted better and more quickly than others to the era of
divided government and the public moderation it requires. They didn't lose
influence in the 2000 election; they simply learned to wield it quietly.
