Cancel the Honeymoon - George W. Bush's administration

At first, some progressive groups were sounding cautiously--not to say speciously--optimistic about working with the Bush Administration. Bipartisanship was supposed to be the watchword in Washington, especially with the closely divided Congress. Bush's early appointment of Christine Todd Whitman to head the EPA was generally received as a conciliatory sign, since she is pro-choice and not openly hostile to environmentalists.

A spokesman for Friends of the Earth, Mark Helm, even told me, "Bush has an opportunity now to do better than the Clinton Administration!" Friends of the Earth came up with a list of key things the new Administration could accomplish, including fighting sprawl, making foreign aid contingent on cutting fossil fuel exploration, and promoting renewable energy sources "like wind power in Iowa," Helm said. Not only might Bush squash Big Oil, Friends of the Earth suggested, he could appoint a great environmentalist to head the Department of Interior, like Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon. Dream on.

A few real gob-stoppers of appointments changed the tenor of progressive interest groups overnight, including James Watt protegee Gale Norton for Secretary of the Interior and rightwing hardliner John Ashcroft for Attorney General. (At least we can look forward to a more fitness-conscious Administration. Bush's pick for Education, Dr. Rod Paige, earned his doctorate with a dissertation on the reaction time of a football lineman. Leave it to W. to comb the Phy Ed department for someone to direct education policy, the centerpiece of his Administration.)

Environmentalists took Bush's choice of Norton as a slap in the face. "This is going to set the environmental movement on fire again," said Helm.

Cancel the honeymoon. It's time for war.

Civil rights groups are the most outraged and have been since the election. Jesse Jackson sent the message by organizing a Hail to the Thief rally on Inauguration Day. The usually soft-spoken Roger Wilkins, a history professor at George Mason University and publisher of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, said of Bush's rise to power, "It's a white-collar Ku Klux Klan operation, really." Wilkins calls the suppression of black votes in Florida "gross thievery and gross racism as well," and "a scorched-earth effort of the kind the Republicans have been known for throughout the South." Nor does he buy the Republican line that it's time to unite behind the new President. "I don't think that's right," he says. "Everything possible should be done to undermine the legitimacy of this President."

Starting with cabinet confirmation hearings, civil rights leaders were determined to buck the inclination, expressed by some Democratic Senators, not to challenge nominees unless they proved to be corrupt or grossly unfit to serve. Ashcroft, a former Senator himself, was the main beneficiary of the Senators' gentlemanly attitude. This despite his own smear campaign against African American judicial nominee Ronnie White, whom President Clinton tried to appoint to the federal bench. Ashcroft described White as "pro-criminal" and distorted his record, claiming, inaccurately, that he opposed the death penalty. Ashcroft has also enraged civil rights groups by cozying up to neo-Confederate racists. And his absolutist anti-abortion views call into question his willingness to carry out the Justice Department's enforcement program protecting access to abortion clinics. "This notion that you would support this reprehensible candidate because of collegiality cannot be tolerated," says Julian Bond, president of the NAACP. "Democrats need to know that their votes are monitored just as the Republicans' votes are monitored."

Bond, like Wilkins, calls the election a "theft." And he is outraged by the conservative argument advanced by William Satire that blacks made a big mistake by voting 9-to-1 against Bush, since now they have no chits to call in.

"The one mistake the Administration is making is they don't understand how angry, how truly angry, African Americans and Latinos are," says Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "They continue to engage in camouflage to try to appear to be inclusive, by making sure they have people of color appear at the Inauguration, for example, as performers," she snorts.

Bush has assembled a racially diverse, if ideologically rightwing, cabinet. But Arnwine calls this "window dressing." The nomination of Ashcroft was "absolutely the worst they could have served up," says Arnwine. "It means the Democratic Party and moderate Republicans have to develop a lot of backbone and not just take an okee-dokee, it's the honeymoon period, philosophy."

So we know there's a lot of outrage and anger out there. But what's the plan?

Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women, doesn't expect any immediate victories. Even before the Ashcroft confirmation hearings, she said: "I think we need to mount a major fight, and I think he'll be confirmed." The fight is important, she said, because it's "movement-building." She compared the uphill battles against Bush's nominees to the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment, which failed, but left behind a big grassroots organization.