Ashcroft and Norton deserve better advocacy. The charge that Norton defended slavery is a cynical slur. What she actually said was that the Confederacy fought for two things the principle of state sovereignty and the practice of slavery and that the specific repugnance of the latter obscured the general merits of the former. Clinton would have had the brains and skill to explain this distinction. Bush, however, could only stammer that Norton was nice, had held a political job, and didn't really support slavery.
Republicans can find other spokesmen to defend their nominees and initiatives.
But none of those spokesmen carries the weight of the president and each brings liabilities. He has signed a hate crimes bill. He put in a bill putting a five-year prison penalty on anyone who was convicted of a crime with a handgun. He has put a number of black jurists on the bench in Missouri. Those words, delivered by the president-elect, might have swayed public opinion in Ashcroft's favor.