The Post Miers Doldrums

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.

There's a lot of chatter about the next step by The Administration. [The Truthiness of it: (a)Miers was attacked because she was potentially anti-abortion. (b)She couldn't sustain the onslaught from the right because of her cronyism and lack of qualifications. (c)She withdrew because of a pretext of client privilege.] The Conservative activists are in a tizzy over this- and making some pretty stern demands of their president. Like children, they are exhibiting the "give them candy once, they'll throw tantrums if you don't each time" syndrome- except Bush has spoiled them rotten his entire career. It is interesting to note that the one time in this Administration that Bush has had to do something political, his "base" refused to support him. Pretty fickle base, isn't it? All or nothing, dead or alive.

John over at AmericaBlog had some very interesting thoughts yesterday and there continues to be a slew of progressive blogs who are saying things like "the talking points are dead!" Here's my criticism with this concept: the talking points, as the conservatives have designed them, don't just die. That's the fact. It's foolish to simply compile a list of what they said and when they said it and how now they can't defend it.

Of course they can defend it, or build new talking points in support of whatever insane scheme comes next. Why? Because there's no viable opposition force speaking against it. And I'm not talking about the blogs- these memes of "they killed their own talking points," and "This is what they said, this is what they did. Note the disconnect" have to get injected into the political debate and have to start making the rounds on television for this to be meaningful. There have got to be Democrats that actually step up and take these lines.

So: Bush either cows to the conservative base in the next couple days and nominates somebody with more "conservative credentials" or decides to take some time and build a consensus candidate. It's more politically viable for him to patch relations across the aisle- but this will alienate further his conservative base. Which will he do?

Bush is inherently a weak man, and his Administration shares this trait. I think he'll cow- grovel at the knees of the conservatives.

Which is fine. The left and the progressive network needs to do three things as I see them:

1. Demand their representatives participate in this process by demanding full disclosure.
2. Demand in the next day or so that Democrats to take a stance which states "any nominee brought forward with a true consensus process will be welcomed, any stance which cows to any political ideology for the sake of appeasement will be strictly scrutinized."
3. Begin developing strategies to deal with the various memes and cultural threads they'll be sending out in self-defense. The progressives above anything need a strategy to deal with this.

Remember: under no circumstances in the SCOTUS search under Bush actually a good outcome for progressives in terms of judicial stance. So we have to continuously push for the best outcome for the country- which is a moderate nominee with an open mind and a clear judicial philosophy. That's what we have to hold our representatives to maintaining.

What else can/should we do in this situation?