How the Harriet Miers nomination undermined the Bush presidency

[Olney Blue]

http://money.cnn.com/blogs/legalpad/2007/01/how-harriet-miers-nomination.html


Monday, January 08, 2007
How the Harriet Miers nomination undermined the Bush presidency


Okay, Iraq and Hurricane Katrina played a role, too. But on the occasion of Harriet Miers's resignation as White House counsel (announced Jan. 4, effective Jan. 31), I thought I'd finally voice a quirky, unprovable, and doubtless offensive-to-many intuition I've harbored ever since President Bush nominated her to become an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court on October 3, 2005.

The Miers nomination split the Republican Party, as everyone recalls, with most of the ideological conservatives--like Bill Kristol, David Frum, George Will, Kate O'Beirne, Charles Krauthammer--putting their collective foot down and taking the position that she was simply not up to the job. In my mind, that's the moment when the wheels came off the George W. Bush presidency.

The big question dogging Bush all along had always been whether he himself was up to his job. He just never seemed to be playing in the same league as other presidents. Even the greatest scoundrels of either party, like Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, had him skunked when it came to knowledge of history, government or international affairs. The notion of President Bush ever trying to mediate a Mid-East peace agreement between two cunning, powerful, antagonistic statesmen - the way Jimmy Carter did at Camp David with President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Menachim Begin in 1978 - was just out of the question from the get-go. However you want to articulate the reasons, we can all agree that he wasn't up to it.

(snip)

It must have been a liberating, cathartic moment for the conservative intelligentsia. For even though Bush drew down Miers's nomination on October 27, 2005, the ideological right has never been able to resume its pre-Miers lock-step. As the Iraq war spiraled toward ever more undeniable fiasco, and the president's moral clarity kept preventing him from adapting to reality, the conservative pundits continued to distance themselves from their president. Eventually, so did the Republican stalwarts who had unsuccessfully backed him on the Miers nomination. Yes, he'd been incompetent in handling Iraq. Yes, he'd been incompetent in handling Katrina. Pretty soon, you had the Iraq Study Group, whose mere existence--put aside its unanimous conclusions--was an unprecedented, bipartisan statement that our president just wasn't up to the job.

[terisan]

1. Harry Reid is supposed to have recommended her nomination

Do you think he knew it might split the Republicans ?

[Olney Blue]

3. I think that Reid honestly thought she might not be a right-wing nutcase

compared to some.

[Mind_your_head]

2. So, why did shrub's handlers put him there?

They took a gamble and they lost is my best guess.

Remember: Those 'handlers' will always be 'out there' (as long as we let them)....because we don't chase them down and stop them.

Peace,
M_Y_H

[Canuckistanian]

8. My theory is, she was Bush's idea all along.

You know how he loves him some female counsel (Condi, Bigfoot, Laura, Angela Merkel )

They tried to wave him off, but, as he says, he's "the decider".

His one and only attempt at power broking, albeit lame. Cut him some slack.

[Warpy]

4. Her nomination proved to me that he didn't give a shit

about the job any more, but I don't think that's when the wheels came off. That it started to wake up a few pundits is another thing, entirely.

The wheels started to come off when sensible people uttered a loud, "Hey, wait just a minute here!" during the interference with the whole Schiavo fiasco. The wheels gave up any pretense of being attached to the clown car during the Katrina aftermath. IMO, that was the true tipping point.

Once people had seen just how thoroughly the whole thing had been bungled, that an entire city had been lost, probably forever, they realized what an empire-obsessed bunch were running this country and how little the American people counted in their plans. That was it. They haven't seen a single thing since then but more bungling, corruption, and utter unsuitability for the job.

Since then, we've seen industry watchdogs appointed by industry and fundies appointed to regulatory agencies appointed by fundies with an apparent hands off policy by this administration and not even the pretense of finding the best person for the job. They really don't give a shit what happens to this country. They're after bigger glory.

[mwb970]

12. Miers, Schiavo, Katrina, Iraq....

It's just been one screwup after another for the whole time! What a horrible administration.

[sendero]

13. I agree..

... IMHO, the Miers fiasco was a footnote, even to the party insiders.

Sometimes writers have to stretch pretty far to come up with a new angle. This one is not compelling at all.

[bleever]

5. It was an oddly unpartisan move. That was the first clue.

It was W saying that he's the preznit and gits his choice.

He picked a beloved lackey.

Karl let him, and that's where the wheels came off the Rove mystique.

[opihimoimoi]

6. For many of us...the WHEELs were never on...Bush was in over his head....

[Recursion]

7. Harriet was the iceberg

This sounds simplistic but I think it's true: *'s real support came from people who thought, honestly, that God put him here to save the country and God would always tell him to do the right thing. Nominating Miers was something they saw as a mistake. If * made a mistake, they were wrong all along. They felt embarrassed, and started tuning out of politics (incidentally, I'm projecting my grandparents onto the entire red electorate, so take this with a grain of salt).

[vickitulsa]

9. Pretty cool article.

I liked this from it too:

William Kristol wrote in The Weekly Standard that Bush had proposed "an unknown and undistinguished figure . . . for an opening that conservatives worked for a generation to see filled with a jurist of high distinction. There is a gaping disproportion between the stakes associated with this vacancy and the stature of the person nominated to fill it." (Emphasis mine.)

Well, exactly. And the "gaping-disproportion" line would've been a great one to describe Bush's bid for the presidency in 2000, too. Kristol had unwittingly turned Harriet Miers into a George W. Bush surrogate. The concerns that couldn't be voiced about Bush now surfaced by proxy. The great discussion was finally on, and this time the conservative intelligentsia wasn't, well, playing dumb anymore. The whole electorate could see that the right-wing pundits had really known all along, but had kept mum on a calculated bet that they could adequately supervise the boy-president and keep him on the rails.

I remember thinking at the time when the Chimp put forth this lady and immediately drew such criticism from many Repugs for it that this WAS a very telling moment. I saw it too -- though I believe Iraq and Katrina were what truly undermined his presidency in a huge way. That, and the continuing exposure to his goofy, childishly petulant, arrogant and noxious public persona that grated on everyone's nerves by the bundle.


Still, has anyone else noticed that the sea change in the public's opinion of Dubya seemed to have come about very quickly when it finally came?

It was almost like one day he was everyone's darling and his approval ratings were way up there no matter how moronic he seemed to some of us, and then in a very few short months he had become an idiot, a naked "Emperor," a dunderhead who embarrassed ALL Americans when he tried to talk like he actually knew anything!

THAT's what I noticed most of all, starting a little over a year ago....

[babylonsister]

10. Did she really 'resign'? I think not. And her replacement is from

the Watergate era? And was considered at one time to be Deep Throat? His appointment disproves that!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_F._Fielding

Fred Fisher Fielding (born March 21, 1939) is senior partner at Wiley Rein & Fielding, a Washington, D.C. law firm. He has served the American government in a number of roles throughout his career.

He served as Associate Counsel for President Nixon from 1970 to 1972, where he was the deputy to John Dean during the Watergate scandal. He was the Counsel to the President for President Reagan from 1981 to 1986. As of Jan. 8, 2007, he had been picked by President Bush to replace outgoing White House Counsel Harriet Miers.<1>

[crispini]

11. Good find, Olney! Excellent read!

The article definitely has the ring of truth. :thumbsup: