Negative capability
President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has performed the difficult task of dividing his most respectful supporters, among whom I count myself. The division is apparent in the email messages we've received in response to our relatively mild comments on Harriet Miers; it is also apparent elsewhere on the Internet. Those who have written to express hostility to us for our comments are long on invective and short on facts. The fact that this division appears to have been unanticipated by the White House is not impressive.
Submitted for your consideration is the following message from a conservative insider of impeccable credentials:
I had same email that Lopez got re: Miers and Leahy. Those of us who are out of the Administration now, but who have friends involved in this Miers process are extremely disappointed. First, in the Miers pick. But that's done now; we have to move on.I may well be mistaken, but my guess is that the White House drew the wrong conclusion from the smashing success it achieved with the Roberts nomination. The White House concluded that the success was due to the number of key points on which the Democrats could not fix Judge Roberts -- a kind of negative capability (to misuse Keats's phrase) that he had maintained despite the length and breadth of his distinguished career. Harriet Miers exceeds Judge Roberts in negative capability. Her negative capability, however, is unadorned by any of the earmarks of devotion to conservative constitutionalilsm or conservative principle.Even more troubling is that the White House has set up Miers to fail, not only with conservatives, but with Democrats. The Leahy conversation was a prime example of this. Miers was never given a media/interview briefing to prepare her for such questions. Leahy's question: which Justices do you admire, is a standard one. She should have been ready for it, and she wasn't.
Why is former Sen. Dan Coats serving as sherpa this time? Where is former Sen. Phil Gramm? Coats deservedly earned a reputation for being someone who avoided heavy lifting during his time in the Senate, confirmed by his time as Ambassador to Germany.
Sen. Gramm, on the other hand, would have been a great one to take Miers around. He would have sent a clearer message to conservatives, never mind the Texas Two-Step stories the pair would generate.
There are additional people who should be out there talking about her. For example, her first chief of staff during her time in the White House is the only one of her former chiefs of staff available for surrogate work (the others remain in Executive Branch service). He was never contacted by the White House, not even to ensure that if he didn't necessarily support her nomination he would make himself unavailable. Again, huge oversight, bad management.
All of this leads into what really bugs those of us who worked hard to keep this President in office: the nomination has the whiff of something with little thought put into it, and of a staff ill-prepared for what took place. In the end, Miers may be confirmed, but the cost - reinforcing the impression of a President and Administration politically weakened and inept - may be of far greater import to both the Republican and conservative movements.
