Capital Bogeyman

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

In American politics, every administration needs a bogeyman – some unlucky staffer or Cabinet member who draws controversy and disdain the way Velcro draws lint. The advantages to the president in keeping a bogeyman handy are obvious, since the controversy and disdain that might otherwise fall on the commander in chief are deflected elsewhere.


Thus Ronald Reagan had his Edwin Meese, George H.W. Bush had his John Sununu, Jimmy Carter had his Bert Lance, and Richard Nixon had his – well, Nixon had Nixon. And we all know what happened to him.


President Bush’s top bogeyman said goodbye last week. In a sentimental valedictory, Attorney General Ashcroft told Justice Department employees Friday that “you have done what so many said could not be done. You have enhanced the freedom of Americans at precisely the time when our freedom has been under its greatest attack.”


The power of this impressive speech was diminished somewhat by the fact that Mr. Ashcroft had already said goodbye – in a “Letter to the American People” issued November 10 – and also by the fact that he’s not going anywhere for at least another month, until Alberto Gonzales is confirmed by the Senate as his replacement.


If Mr. Ashcroft doesn’t hurry up, his long goodbye may last longer than Barbra Streisand’s first farewell tour.


Ms. Streisand, incidentally, is pretty unambiguous about Mr. Ashcroft’s status as bogeyman. “I find him scary,” she told a meeting of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2002. And she is not alone. The adjective “scary” is a particular favorite among Mr. Ashcroft’s critics, who do seem uncommonly susceptible to the willies.


“Who needs terrorists when we have John Ashcroft to scare us out of our pants?” wrote Dick Meyer, the editorial director of CBSnews.com, in a 2002 column. A columnist for the Washington Post, Richard Cohen, called Mr. Ashcroft the “scariest man in government.”


Even when they manage to keep their courage up, Mr. Ashcroft’s critics tend to sound unhinged. The esteemed journalist Anthony Lewis – winner of two Pulitzer Prizes – somehow conflated the attorney general with a mass murderer. In a 2002 interview, Mr. Lewis said: “Certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft.”


I wonder: Is Mr. Lewis absolutely certain he’s right about that?


Senator Kerry turned Mr. Ashcroft into a standard laugh line in his stump speeches: “There are so many people here of different beliefs, different colors, different backgrounds, different abilities that this gathering represents John Ashcroft’s worst nightmare.”


Mr. Ashcroft is well equipped to be a bogeyman. Even by the standards of public life, he seems remarkably devoid of humor or playful irony, with his gravelly baritone and gravedigger’s demeanor. Stumbling through press interviews, he shows little evidence of his degrees from Yale University and the University of Chicago law school. He is a black hole of charisma, a man so densely packed that not a single beam of likeability can escape from him.


But these are cosmetic shortcomings. The caricature built by Mr. Ashcroft’s critics makes it difficult to pick out a substantial critique of his work as attorney general. Much of that, of course, centers on the Patriot Act that Mr. Ashcroft ferociously championed – and that generated a hysteria of its own.


In January 2003, for example, the American Library Association declared that Section 215 of the act represented a “present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users” by allowing authorities capriciously to confiscate personal library records.


Even librarians – supposedly such a mousy bunch -couldn’t resist the opportunities for self-righteousness. Declaring her resistance to Mr. Ashcroft’s jackboot, Marie Bryan, a California librarian, told the Sacramento Bee newspaper: “I am literally willing to go to jail for it.”


Unfortunately for Ms. Bryan, no one wanted to throw her in jail. Indeed, the sheer unreason of the librarians’ case suggests that a lot of the anti-Ashcroft declarations were mere vanity – a self-advertisement of superior sensitivity.


Certainly, genuine arguments didn’t seem to rebut the criticism. For decades, grand juries have routinely issued subpoenas for library and other personal records in criminal investigations. The Patriot Act, simply but importantly, extended that power to investigations involving “international terrorism” and “national security.” At the same time, it reasserted or strengthened traditional civil-liberty safeguards (the requirement to obtain a court order, for example).


Meanwhile, as he himself is quick to point out, Mr. Ashcroft oversaw genuine accomplishments in criminal and civil justice, especially in areas of particular concern to his critics.


Federal gun prosecutions increased 76% during Mr. Ashcroft’s tenure, according to Justice Department figures. The Corporate Fraud Task Force convicted executives from Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc., Adelphia Communications Corp., and other companies. Violent crime, falling for a decade now, accelerated its dramatic decline. The department secured the largest civil penalty in history against one company – the Atlanta-based Colonial Pipeline Co. – for violating environmental laws.


It’s hard to reconcile such achievements with the Ashcroft caricature. And it’s doubtful that news of them would alter the public perception of the attorney general in any case, even as he enters the second month of his long, self-congratulatory farewell.


Facts may be stubborn things, as John Adams said, but the need for bogeymen is more stubborn still – especially in today’s fractured politics, when partisans no longer care to distinguish between a bogeyman and a straw man.



Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.


The New York Sun

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