SNOW--BLIND.(a John Ashcroft snow globe, meant as satire, has become popular with the attorney general himself)(Brief Article)

David Israelite, the deputy chief of staff at the United States Department of Justice, has a snow globe on the coffee table in his office, in Washington, D.C. It is six inches in circumference, and contains a polyurethane-resin bust of Attorney General John Ashcroft. "The likeness is uncanny," Israelite says. When he shakes the orb, it fills up with plastic snowflakes, and when he winds a little crank at its base, out comes a tinkly rendition of "White Christmas." He thinks it's hilarious. So does his boss, the Attorney General, who is its actual owner.

This was not quite what Marshall Reese and Nora Ligorano--Brooklynites in their forties who voted for Ralph Nader--had in mind last year when they created the Ashcroft snow globe. They had intended it to be a work of scathing political art, an indictment of Ashcroft's methods and policies. So when they learned that one of their John Ashcroft snow globes had come into the possession of Ashcroft himself they were, as Reese put it, "shocked."

This is how the Ashcroft snow globe came to be Ashcroft's: In January, the girlfriend of Charles McKenna, an executive assistant U.S. Attorney in Newark, saw the snow globe in the window of a bookstore in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. She bought one for him, and he took it to work, where it soon attracted the admiration of his boss, the U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie. Not long afterward, McKenna went to Williamsburg to buy one for him, too.

Christie had served as counsel to the Bush 2000 campaign's New Jersey team, and Ashcroft paid him a visit in August and noticed the snow globe on a credenza behind his desk. "Is that really me?" Ashcroft asked, chuckling. He picked it up, turned it over, then shook it. "That's really funny," he said. "That's great!" Later, as the Attorney General was preparing to leave, Christie surprised him with a snow globe of his own, which he had asked McKenna to get for him earlier that day.