By Diana LaBrecque
Though just his name invokes almost immediate controversy, there is one thing that can be agreed on: John Ashcroft knows how to talk to the public. His strong voice and personal demeanor was hard to miss when he spoke to a broad audience at the Adams Playhouse on Tuesday night. His polite and candid manor remained composed as he discussed general topics like what it means to be a leader, to more sensitive issues like the Patriot Act. He told several anecdotes from his time as U.S Attorney General including an account of the unsteady days following September 11th. During his hour-long lecture he seemed to have quoted everyone from his late grandfather to Einstein and Thomas Paine.
One main theme of the evening, including his rebuttal of criticism against President Bush, was his overuse of metaphors. At one point he managed to link the job of preventing another terrorist attack to putting together a puzzle without the use of the box top. He also compared America’s immediate need for information and its high demand for privacy to interstate highways–which will always run alongside each other but need reconciliation where they intersect. Though, at times, he may have gotten a bit lost in his own imagery, Ashcroft assured the audience that the most responsible way to reconcile the past is to shape the future and become reoriented with ourselves as leaders.
On the topic of security versus liberty, Ashcroft firmly established that he believes that liberty is the only value and that it shouldn’t compete with anything else. He clearly and repeatedly stated that the only thing worth securing, in our occasionally disjoined state as a nation, is liberty. Ashcroft bordered on being cliché when he bravely mentioned Emily Lazarus and her quotation that adorns the Statue of Liberty. No one can argue that he didn’t end on a high note when he declared that the idea of leadership is to safeguard our own liberty and commit ourselves to the value of freedom.
Every College Republican sucked in air during the extended Q&A session following Ashcroft’s speech. The questions were varied, to say the least, but most were asked calmly and answered with respect. One individual asked for a direct apology from Ashcroft after he recalled becoming apprehended by police after a protest in D.C. The response from Ashcroft was simple-he couldn’t apologize for anything he hadn’t been a part of. Other students asked more expected questions regarding the Bush administration from why September 11th couldn’t have been prevented and how our generation is going to fix the damaging effects of the war. These, Ashcroft evaded slightly and brought up other wars as being more damaging and less focused than this present one.
Most people want to hate the man but even after hearing him tell a joke about the government’s ability to dodge questions from a third grader, it’s hard to completely dislike him. The majority of the campus (and Beyonce) may think so-going to the left can’t solve every situation.
