Starting Black History Month With a Bang: Confirming John Ashcroft

Let's start with the most charitable, nay, an impossibly charitable, take on John Ashcroft: He's not nearly as bad as his reputation, and the huge numbers of Missouri African Americans who voted against his reelection to the Senate just happened to prefer a dead guy. Furthermore, let us assume, he, unlike almost everyone else in the entire world, is able to shift in a matter of months from rabid, extreme advocacy to impartial evenhandness with regard to people he professionally professed to loathe.

He's still clearly a terrible choice.

For a man professing to be a uniter, President Bush seems stunningly unaware of the value of appearances for bringing people together. Even if Ashcroft were a civil rights wonder, the fact that he's unable to convincingly convey that is grounds enough to bar him from a post which is the heart of civil rights enforcement. Given this fact, it's difficult to see how, even given the impossibly charitable reading of Ashcroft, this is an unifying appointment.

African Americans have had little reason to trust the justice system, and, simply judging from his last Senate race, little reason to trust Ashcroft. Even if Ashcroft had all the good will in the world, isn't the mistrust of so many African Americans an enormous handicap for the AG to start out with? And the mistrust people feel for Ashcroft -- rightly or wrongly (although, I think, in this case, rightly) -- properly will contaminate Bush so as to ensure a hostile and suspicious reaction to future ambiguous moves he may (will) make. Bush is either profoundly clueless or astoundingly cynical to have nominated Ashcroft, or, perhaps most likely, both.

Is Bush simply unable to understand why African Americans might find Ashcroft a horrible choice? Or why the post of Attorney General has a special importance for the African American community, especially in light of the Flordia vote? We can grant that acceptibility by African Americans (or gays, or pro-choice women, or gun control advocates, or civil libertarians, or...) is not necessarily the sole determining criteria of suitability for Attorney General, but I don't see that it was taken into account at all. It hearkens back to Dick Cheney's miraculous discovery that he, himself, after all, was the best choice for vice president.

Do they even care if they fool anyone? Are they even fooling themselves?

And the Democrats have given a poor showing in all this. I dearly wish someone had had the guts to filibuster, if only long enough to delay the vote another day; yes, yes, the Democrats delayed the vote in the first place. But still, was it too much to hope that someone would have found confirming Ashcroft on the first day of Black History Month repugnant enough to do something about it?

Let that be the first lesson of this year's Black History Month: It was too much to hope for.