Jonah Goldberg devoted the first 700 words of his 800-word column this week to marveling at the rehabilitation of John Ashcroft’s public image in light of James Comey’s recent testimony. (For what it’s worth, I think much of the Ashcroft praise is misplaced for reasons that I explained over the weekend.) The column basically just takes the WaPo’s front-page piece on Ashcroft from a couple of days ago and adds some personal commentary (we learn, for example, that Goldberg’s wife has worked for Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales).
Eventually, however, Goldberg gets to his provocative point.
[H]istory — even freshly minted history — has a remarkable way of erasing conventional wisdom. If in 2002 I had written that by 2007 Democrats would be singing Ashcroft’s praises as a man of integrity and sound temperament, I would have been laughed out of the room. Right now, predicting a rehabilitation of George W. Bush elicits similar guffaws from the crowd. But the fact is if Ashcroft can be rehabilitated, anyone can.
It’s generally foolish to predict how future political observers will look back at contemporary events, but on this one I feel pretty confident: Jonah, it ain’t gonna happen.
Ashcroft’s image has received a boost over the last week because the public learned something about his decision making that was unexpected, and played against type. Can Bush say the same?
In a confrontation with the Bush White House’s play for power, Ashcroft, at least in this one instance, supported the rule of law. Bush was the one responsible for the decision to ignore the rule of law. If the various media accounts are accurate, Ashcroft signed off on a legally dubious surveillance program repeatedly, but accepted reality once confronted with the facts. Bush never saw and/or never cared about the facts, and resisted reality at every turn.
When push came to shove on this one issue, Ashcroft was willing to buck the president’s wishes. There’s no real comparison here to Bush, who rarely disagrees with his own wishes.
“If Ashcroft can be rehabilitated, anyone can”? Almost anyone. In order for Bush’s standing and reputation to improve, we’d have to learn that he strongly and forcefully opposed all of his own decisions, policies, and self-created scandals. That somehow, the president was captive to his own team, which forced him to repeatedly make choices that not only didn’t work, but ultimately undermined the country.
In other words, for Bush to look better, we’d have to believe that he opposed himself at every step of his failed presidency. Somehow, that doesn’t strike me as likely.