And what about this:
A day after Bush publicly beseeched skeptical supporters to trust his judgment on [White House counsel Harriet] Miers, a succession of prominent conservative leaders told his representatives that they did not. Over the course of several hours of sometimes testy exchanges, the dissenters complained that Miers was an unknown quantity with a thin r?sum? and that her selection -- Bush called her "the best person I could find" -- was a betrayal of years of struggle to move the court to the right.Laugh if you must, but the saddest part of this is that a woman as accomplished as Harriet Miers should be thought of as unqualified for anything. I am sure she is a very disciplined, competent, and shrewd woman who deserves better than this. I just hate the way Bush has sold this. He and his allies are so tin-eared that they don't even recognize how foolish they sound in guaranteeing her conservative bona fides.
At one point in the first of the two off-the-record sessions, according to several people in the room, White House adviser Ed Gillespie suggested that some of the unease about Miers "has a whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism." Irate participants erupted and demanded that he take it back. Gillespie later said he did not mean to accuse anyone in the room but "was talking more broadly" about criticism of Miers.
The Supreme Court is a curiously regarded part of our system of government. It is often reviled, but maybe just as often revered. It makes and breaks the greatest issues of our times. And it is not to be trifled with. That is a lesson learned by Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Bush the Younger, I believe, will learn this, too.