Word: ashcroft
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...outsiders, pragmatists and purists, Bush was not only paying off past favors to constituencies but also, he hopes, building goodwill for the future. If he needs to ignore Christian Conservatives when it comes time to wink at China's persecution of Christians, his selection of archconservative former Senator John Ashcroft for Attorney General will help the medicine go down. Business developers got Gale Norton, the Interior nominee known for her eagerness to open wilderness areas to industry. Corporate America, meet Mr. Paul O'Neill, lately of Alcoa. Moderate suburbanites got Christine Todd Whitman, the moderate, suburban New Jersey Governor...
...spend more political capital defending his picks than he has got by making such wide use of the G.O.P. bench. Worst of all, one of these picks may be a constant draw on his account. Just as James Watt or Jocelyn Elders became poster children for entire Administrations, Ashcroft or Chavez or Norton--the three candidates whose rhetoric and records Democrats consider most extreme--may appear on every Democratic fund-raising letter between now and the 2002 election...
...environmentDaniel Weiss, political director of the Sierra Club, calls Ashcroft's record "extremely anti-environment," emphasizing the former senator's past votes against taking arsenic out of drinking water, for weakening the Clean Air and Water acts and allowing mining companies to dump cyanide in public lands. The environmental movement is primarily joining the fight against Ashcroft as a warm-up for their real battle: To unseat Interior Secretary-designate Gale Norton...
...Separation of church and state Ashcroft's visits to Bob Jones University (where he has received an honorary degree), his personal associations with evangelical leaders like Pat Robertson and his support of public funding for "faith-based" charity work leads many civil liberties groups to worry about an influx of so-called "Christian" ideology into public life...
...these groups manage to turn up substantial heat under Ashcroft (as some observers predict they will), Bush will face a crisis of faith, so to speak. Will he stand by his man, absorbing the political body blows as a form of payback to the right-wing religious organizations that secured his election? Or will he eventually decide that defending Ashcroft's potentially divisive record could cost more political capital than he's willing to lose so early in the game...