[Mb-civic] A Weakened President Faces New Risks - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/27/AR2005102702271.html?nav=hcmodule
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