Cancel the Honeymoon.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: 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...