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.