Defeated Senator Gets New Life

For more than two decades John Ashcroft was one of Missouri's biggest vote-getters, winning office as state attorney general, governor and U.S. senator. Then he made political history by losing to a dead man.

Now Ashcroft, 58, is scheduled to join the administration of President-elect Bush. He was introduced Friday as Bush's choice for attorney general.

Ashcroft and Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan were tied in the polls when Carnahan died in a plane crash Oct. 16.

At first, Ashcroft suspended his public campaign activities, then crept cautiously back into campaign mode. But he never regained his familiar confidence and lost to Carnahan by about 49,000 votes out of more than 2.3 million ballots cast. Carnahan's widow, Jean, was named to take his seat in the Senate.

Ashcroft served as Missouri attorney general from 1977 to 1985, when he started the first of two consecutive terms as governor. He started in public life in Missouri as an assistant attorney general under then-Attorney General John Danforth, the man Ashcroft succeeded as U.S. senator. During this time, Ashcroft shared an office in Jefferson City with another assistant, Clarence Thomas, now a member of the U.S. Supreme Court.

During his re-election campaign, Ashcroft was criticized for his role in defeating the nomination for a federal judgeship of Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ronnie White, a Carnahan appointee and the first black member of Missouri's highest court.

Ashcroft said he opposed White because he considered his record to be soft on criminals. But black leaders said they felt there were racist overtones in the defeat of White, and pledged to work against Ashcroft's re-election.

Ashcroft steered the effort behind the party-line vote that marked the first defeat for a White House judicial candidate since the full Senate in 1987 crushed President Reagan's nomination of conservative jurist Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination.

Defending the senator's record, Ashcroft's allies pointed out he placed the first woman on Missouri's highest court and the first black judge on the Missouri Court of Appeals in Kansas City and in the Senate voted for dozens of women and minority nominees.

And on Friday, Ashcroft pledged as attorney general to work for justice for everyone.

"You have my word that I will administer the Department of Justice with integrity, I will advise your administration with integrity and I will enforce the laws ... with integrity," he promised Bush.

Ashcroft, a gospel-singing son of an Assemblies of God minister, doesn't drink, smoke or dance. He can be stiff in formal settings, and even informal ones. "Some politicians dominate a room; he fades into the wallpaper," the National Review once wrote of him.

But he also can be a fierce partisan and is solidly conservative, opposing most abortions and supporting allowing Missourians to carry concealed guns.

He is cosidered scandal-free, with a folksy, some say corny, sense of humor that comes across best in small, informal settings.

Introducing his wife, Janet, to a Republican crowd in Oklahoma, he joked about who was the boss in the Ashcroft household: "I just thought I'd share with you that I run things in my house. I run the dishwasher ... She let me run the dustmop last week."

Ashcroft jumped at an invitation this week to play Christmas carols on the piano in a senior citizens apartment complex, leading residents in singing Jingle Bells.

A baritone, he is one-fourth of the Singing Senators quartet, which has produced a CD and performed on the Grand Ole Opry and in Branson, Mo. Ashcroft has also written hundreds of gospel songs and recorded several albums of his own.