Will Integrity Be Enough For Ashcroft?

As we approach the confirmation season, a word of caution: Beware the "I" word, integrity. It is a situational trickster.

President-elect George W. Bush has used the word liberally in naming the prospective members of his Cabinet. It's only natural that he laud his nominees and dress them up in superlatives and lofty descriptives. To hear Bush tell it, every one of his picks is a leader and every one has integrity.

But the word has not attached to many as it has to John Ashcroft, the outgoing junior senator from Missouri, whom Bush has nominated as our next attorney general.

Not only has Bush, a slew of conservatives, assorted commentators and Senate colleagues made "integrity" a veritable synonym for Ashcroft, but the Senator himself has done so as well. He invoked the word several times in his brief nomination acceptance speech last week.

If integrity means "the quality or state of being complete; unbroken condition; wholeness; entirety," as first defined in Webster's New World Collegiate Dictionary, Third Edition, then, yes, Ashcroft has it.

I got to know Ashcroft fairly well over the course of covering him for three years. He is genial, polite and, in an old-fashioned and controlled way, funny. He and I often began our interview sessions with fond recalls of "Andy Griffith" episodes, which we both love, or with tales from his farm in Missouri where he is supposedly quite a hand with the bush hog. Sometimes we talked about the life of a preacher's kid, which we both are. I found him pleasant and engaging.

Moreover, whenever Ashcroft had a legislative idea or an opinion about a proposal or policy, he defended it with such vigor and passion that one could only assume his sincerity. Hypocrisy did not seem to fit the man.

His conviction and conservative fidelity did, indeed, seem unbroken, whole, entire.

But what those convictions are is the rub.

Although Ashcroft was not an official part of the Republican Revolution of 1994 -- he was elected that year to the Senate and the recognized revolutionaries" were GOP members of the House -- he had the same juice. The spirit of rebellion was all in him, and he came in ready to dismantle the federal powers and scatter the spoils to the states. So determined was he that when the new Republican majority went on a devolution binge, Ashcroft went so far as to propose block-granting food stamps, a move that would have taken away the federal guarantee of food for poor people. It was an entitlement, he said, and entitlements were, per se, wrong.

Too, Ashcroft sired the concept of giving faith-based charities some of government' s social responsibilities ... along with some of the people's money to pay for it.

He is an unyielding anti-choice crusader, tried to make Surgeon General David Satcher look like a quack and a villain, sought to punish juveniles more harshly, created a valentine for big business under the guise of more family-friendly overtime laws and otherwise kept the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Christian Coalition pleased as punch.

And there was his endless campaign against "judicial activism," a term of art that might ironically apply to conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court now in light of the gymnastics that handed Bush the presidency.

For what it's worth to non-conservatives, be assured that Ashcroft is a true believer, not merely a rhetorician.

In that way, he has integrity, no doubt.

But does Ashcroft have the right stuff for the chief law enforcement officer of a country whose ethnic, economic, social and cultural diversity grows by the day?

There, like the question of what "is" is, it depends on the integrity of "integrity."

Deborah Mathis is a columnist for Tribune Media Services