With Conservative Pick, President Will Rebound Quickly

A Weakened President Faces New Risks

By Dan Balz and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 28, 2005; Page A01

President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers on Oct. 3 was made from a position of weakness by a White House beset by political problems and eager to avoid a fight over the Supreme Court. Twenty-four excruciating days later, the supposed safe choice crashed, exposing the president as even weaker than before.

Bush now has an opportunity to recover from one of the biggest political miscalculations of his term, the failure to anticipate the backlash Miers would cause with his own conservative base. But in repairing that breach, he risks a new confrontation with Democrats and further estrangement from the political center -- precisely the situation he hoped to avoid when he tapped his loyal and unassuming personal lawyer in the first place.

Few Republicans in Washington saw the timing of Miers's withdrawal as coincidental. With potential indictments of senior White House officials looming in the CIA leak case, the president could ill afford a sustained and increasingly raw rupture within the GOP coalition.

The Miers nomination was more than a humiliation for Bush, however. It was an episode that seemed wholly out of character with the president's style. No Republican president -- not even Ronald Reagan -- has catered to the right more methodically than Bush. But on a matter of first-order significance to many conservatives, the president let personal loyalty override what had been a central tenet of his political strategy.

Across Washington yesterday, there were all manner of explanations being offered: that special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's leak investigation had distracted top advisers such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove; that growing insularity within the president's inner circle had skewed his judgment; that Bush had grown cocksure, blithely assuming conservatives would respect the choice because it came from him.

The uproar over Miers was distinctive in another way: The loudest opposition came from conservative intellectuals, not grass-roots activists. Bush's team managed at first to keep cultural and religious conservatives divided over Miers with aggressive lobbying of leading figures such as Focus on the Family's James C. Dobson, who endorsed Miers immediately. But they could not withstand the battering that came from opinion-shapers such as columnists George Will and Charles Krauthammer, Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and former White House speechwriter David Frum. By the end, even Dobson announced he probably would have reversed course and opposed her.

Nor in the end could Bush stand up to the barrage of criticism coming from Capitol Hill, where the nominee's meetings with senators stirred unease about her prospects of surviving the grilling that was coming in confirmation hearings. Rarely has a nominee faced the kind of criticism that Miers heard from Republican leaders such as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (Pa.).

This convergence of special factors in the Miers situation makes its long-term impact hard to predict. A number of Republicans said yesterday that, assuming Bush selects a new nominee widely judged to be well qualified, the damage may dissipate quickly. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) described Miers's withdrawal as "a speed bump" that will have no lasting significance. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said, "The sense was of disappointment, not of betrayal."

Far from being "weakened," this whole affair has strengthened the Republican party and the President because it reconfirmed that the strength of the party lies in its conservative base. Republicans again and again have to be reminded that "fortune favors the bold" and that they are most successful when they are unapologetically faithful to their conservative ideals. Everytime the Republicans attempt to reachout to the left, they get burned, and everytime they hold the line and stay truly conservative they win big.

Full Story: Apres L'Affair Miers

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