A Self-Inflicted Wound
Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers is a miscalculation that could cost him dearly. Can she still win confirmation?
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Oct. 7, 2005 - A good makeup artist could have erased those dark circles under Harriet Miers's eyes as she appeared before the cameras to accept President Bush's nomination to the Supreme Court last Monday. Described by White House aides as Bush's "work wife," she spent so many hours toiling in the West Wing that colleagues once thought her red Mercedes had been abandoned in the parking lot.
Dutiful she is, but Supreme Court material she is not. Before taking over as White House counsel earlier this year, she was staff secretary, a position of so little consequence it's not even depicted on "The West Wing," the fictional TV drama about White House life. Miers put in long hours and was the last person to put paper on the president's desk, but she wasn't mulling over constitutional issues.
With his presidency spinning out of control, Bush needed to reach high with this appointment. Instead he made the easiest decision possible. He reached for the person he knows best, a miscalculation that could cost him dearly. "This is a meltdown?-this is what a Republican meltdown looks like," says a Republican strategist with ties to the conservative wing of the party. At meetings on Capitol Hill and all over Washington, conservatives were in an uproar while party regulars were dumbfounded by Bush's latest self-inflicted wound. "When you have economic difficulties, people dying in a war, political corruption and a government that is seen as unresponsive, in this ugly, harsh political environment, he needed to go above and beyond," says the strategist. "He needed to pick someone who is potentially more conservative, but certainly more qualified."
Conservatives gagged and liberals gasped when Bush said with a straight face in the Rose Garden that Miers was the most qualified person he could find. More evidence they're drinking Kool-Aid in the White House: David Frum, a former White House speechwriter, reported on his blog that Miers once told him that Bush was "the most brilliant man she'd ever met." What will happen when she has a conversation with Justice Antonin Scalia? Will her head explode?
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