Ashcroft's lightning- rod role

Paul Rosenzweig, senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, says the jury is still out whether Ashcroft's campaign against his critics will work.

"They spent a year and a half doing nothing (about the criticism), presumably thinking it would fade; that has obviously proven to be wrong," says Mr. Rosenzweig. "So I certainly welcome the recognition by the attorney general that he needs to fight for his programs."

The problem, says Rosenzweig, is that the two elements of the debate - what he calls the "legitimate, heartfelt concerns" about the need for checks and balances in law enforcement and the "political litany" that Ashcroft's actions have unleashed - have merged into one critique.

Some of Ashcroft's conservative critics are taking the long view, and imagining the potential for future mischief with the powers of the Patriot Act. "We are concerned not about Ashcroft, but about a possible subsequent attorney general, named by President Hillary Rodham Clinton, who might define as terrorists those of us who peacefully oppose government policies," writes Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation.

The more controversial Patriot Act powers include the ability to conduct so-called "sneak and peak" searches, with secret warrants and indefinitely delayed notification of the target. Another measure, Section 215, allows the FBI wide latitude to secretly access personal records, such as medical, banking, and library information. The use of this provision is classified, but Ashcroft chose to reveal last week that Section 215 had yet to be utilized, an announcement aimed at quelling what he called "hysteria" among librarians.

On the eve of the second anniversary of 9/11, President Bush - not Ashcroft - announced a proposal for still-wider law enforcement powers against terror suspects. It may be, say political analysts, that the topic has gotten so hot that the president himself, more popular in polls than Ashcroft, has to take on the most controversial announcements. The proposal faces an uphill battle in Congress.

But Bush's one-speech foray into the legal dimension of the war on terror also demonstrates that, in the end, there's no daylight between Bush and Ashcroft (even if at times, Ashcroft has appeared to go off the reservation - such as the time he announced from Moscow the capture of a key terrorist, ahead of what the administration had planned to say).

"Clearly, Ashcroft takes a lot of heat," says Ellis, the author on presidential lightning rods. "Whether that helps Bush is hard to say. The idea of a lightning rod is you're deflecting blame from the president. At some point, people can attract lightning to the administration."

For now, Bush still gets favorable marks from the public in the war on terrorism, and Ashcroft remains popular among Christian conservatives. His usefulness in rallying Bush's conservative base in the 2004 election may be the strongest selling point for keeping him in the Cabinet.

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