Politics

Ashcroft Bows Out Of 2000 Run

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 5, 1999 / 11:12 AM EST / CBS

Republican Sen. John Ashcroft said Tuesday that he will not run for president. Instead, Ashcroft said he will focus on winning a second term in the Senate in 2000.

"This is not a time for individuals to place ambition above the needs of the American people," he said. "Leadership is about making choices. ... I come here to say today that I choose serving Missouri in the United States Senate."

Ashcroft made his announcement before about 400 supporters in the gymnasium of the Springfield Boys and Girls Club, where he played basketball as a boy. The gym walls were plastered with "Ashcroft!" placards to show support for either decision.

"Go, John, go!" chanted the crowd in the building, located across the street from Ashcroft's church, the Central Assembly of God.

Ashcroft faces a challenge from popular Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan in 2000, when the Republican Party risks losing its Senate majority.

Carnahan's senior adviser, Roy Temple, who attended the announcement, said he was not surprised that Ashcroft did not make a bid for president.

Meeting with reporters after the speech, Temple said Carnahan would run as a moderate while pointing out Ashcroft's "extreme right-wing agenda" as articulated during more than a year of national travels.

"Missourians need to look closely at the message that John Ashcroft spread across the country," Temple said. He said that since Republicans fell short in the November elections, "anybody paying attention since November can tell he's been trying to reinvent himself again."

Following a recent two-day swing across Missouri to explain his policies, many felt that Ashcroft planned to announce his candidacy for both president and Senate re-election.

"To be in a very close race for re-election and simultaneously running a national presidential campaign is only several steps short of insanity," University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said last month.

"He now has about as tough a battle to retain his seat as exists anywhere in the country," Sabato said.

Some Republicans wanted the freshman senator to focus exclusively on keeping his seat, concerned that by continuing to woo religious conservative leaders in a White House bid, Ashcroft would risk alienating mainstream voters back home.

He drew fire from social conservatives, however, when he reshaped his message last month for a broader, more moderate national audience.

The first whispers about a possible presidential bid began with Ashcroft's 1994 Senate election. Ashcroft, 56, quickly scaled Missouri's political ladder, winning two terms as attorney general and two more as governor after his first outing, a failed bid for Congress in 1972.

In the Senate, Ashcroft has often found himself frustrated, settling for symbolic votes on the big ideas he embraces, from tax cuts to congressional term limits.

"The Senate has become a legislative graveyard which buries conservative ideas to help improve Americans' lives," he complained last year, when GOP leaders refused even to consider a five-year, $80 billion tax cut plan passed by the House.