Can John Ashcroft be stopped?

What led the Democrats to bungle their encounter with Thomas? In part, it was the sheer vanity of then-committee chair Biden. Biden -- who a few years earlier had been caught plagiarizing a speech by British labor leader Neil Kinnock -- still harbored presidential aspirations and was fearful of appearing prosecutorial. The Delaware Democrat has long been one of the Senate's most famous wafflers on controversial nominations, perhaps because he so fears being seen as in the pocket of any constituency that he is late to read the clearest writing on the wall.

In 1986, he praised Bork as a qualified conservative and promised to vote for him should he be named to the Supreme Court: "I'd have to vote for him, and if the groups tear me apart that's the medicine I'd have to take." Yet a year later he ended up opposing Bork's nomination -- only to grow so bitter toward liberal anti-Bork lobbying groups for what he viewed as distortions of his statements that he refused to meet with them anymore. The bad blood between Biden and civil rights groups hampered the opposition to Thomas.

And in 1991, he was as equivocal on Thomas as he'd been about Bork, first praising and then ultimately opposing him with a long awkward period of fence-straddling in between.

But even more important, Biden and the other Judiciary Committee Democrats were effectively disarmed by two weapons Thomas brought with him into the confirmation room: the sponsorship of his first boss and patron, Sen. John Danforth, with whom Thomas visited virtually every member of the Senate in advance of his hearings; and a compelling personal story of a hardscrabble childhood in Pinpoint, Ga., a narrative of rising from the poverty of the segregated South to Yale Law School and the federal bench. On one of Thomas' shoulders stood the angel of senatorial courtesy, on the other sat Horatio Alger.

With John Ashcroft, Bush strategists have invited those two angels back. Ashcroft, too, is a Danforth protégé. Ashcroft, too, has a compelling personal narrative -- not a Horatio Alger story this time, but a faith-drenched tale of family integrity: his minister father inviting black missionaries into the family home in segregated Missouri; Ashcroft's devout religious practice; his charity toward gay and minority staff members. As with Thomas, Republicans hope that Ashcroft's public stature and personal story will disarm Democratic opposition, no matter how many provocative speeches, articles and campaign contributions surface.

What's more, the Republicans may have an Anita Hill they can demonize. There are already indications that Ashcroft's advocates are planning to rough up Missouri Judge Ronnie White to legitimize Ashcroft's opposition to his federal appointment. White himself is expected to testify at the Ashcroft confirmation hearing this week. So once again, the Judiciary Republicans may go on the attack against an African-American accuser -- and it will be interesting to see if Democrats mount a more effective counteroffensive this time, or if they simply hang White out to dry as they once hung Hill.

The early signs suggest that the Republicans' strategy could work. The influential Biden is reprising his muddled role, declaring within days of Ashcroft's nomination that he was "inclined" to vote for the nomination, only to back off on Sunday talk shows a few days later. Meanwhile Republicans keep sticking to a clear and simple message: that Ashcroft's record of integrity will carry the day.

The irony is that the climate for defeating Ashcroft is far more favorable than that faced by Thomas' antagonists in 1991. The unintended byproduct of President Clinton's impeachment was to reveal in the American public a deep mistrust of moral extremists in the John Ashcroft-Ken Starr mold. The excesses of the war on drugs, the exonerations of death-row inmates and concerns about the cost of the nation's burgeoning prison population have all reduced the appeal of the hard-line, law-and-order agenda pursued by Ashcroft in Missouri and in the Senate.

And Clarence Thomas was nominated in the shadow of the still overwhelmingly popular Ronald Reagan; Ashcroft goes to confirmation on behalf of an administration that lost the popular vote. Thomas' odder writings were circulated only among a small circle of opposition lobbyists and journalists; Ashcroft's praise for the neo-confederate Southern Partisan is available on the Internet for all to see.

The question, then, is not whether the public could turn against Ashcroft. Between his dinosaur conservatism, his extreme opposition to reproductive rights -- even contraception -- and his paid service to the insurance industry, going after Ashcroft in today's climate is like shooting fish in a barrel. The question is whether Senate Democrats have the sense to recognize their political opportunity, and the strategic capacity to tell a different story about the Man of Integrity.

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