The Washington Post has a great
article on two meetings Gillespie and Mehlman conducted with conservative leaders on Wednesday. The activists expressed strong opposition to Miers:
The main complaints cited at the Norquist and Weyrich sessions yesterday, according to several accounts, centered on Miers's lack of track record and the charge of cronyism. "It was very tough and people were very unhappy," said one person who attended. Another said much of the anger resulted from the fact that "everyone prepared to go to the mat" to support a strong, controversial nominee and Miers was a letdown. As a result, a third attendee observed, Gillespie and Mehlman came in for rough treatment: "They got pummeled. I've never seen anything like it."
The 90-minute Norquist session, where Gillespie appeared before 100 activists, was the more fiery encounter, according to participants. Among those speaking out was Jessica Echard, executive director of the Eagle Forum, founded by Phyllis Schlafly. Although she declined to give a full account later because of the meeting ground rules, Echard said in an interview that her group could not for now support Miers: "We feel this is a disappointment in President Bush. If it's going to be a woman, we expected an equal heavyweight to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her liberal stance, and we did not get that in Miss Miers."
Another conservative captured the mood, according to a witness, by scorning Miers. "She's the president's nominee," he said. "She's not ours."
At Weyrich's two-hour luncheon featuring Mehlman and Goeglein addressing 85 activists, the host opened the discussion by rejecting Bush's call to trust him. "I told Mehlman that I had had five 'trust-mes' in my long history here . . . and I said, 'I'm sorry, but the president saying he knows her heart is insufficient," Weyrich said, referring to Republican court appointments that resulted in disappointment for conservatives.
Opposition to Miers is now coming not only from conservative intellectuals, but also from the Christian Right. Earlier this week I was confident that leaders of the Religious Right, reassured by Miers' Evangelical credentials, would fall into line. But now Dobson is expressing doubts about Miers, and Schlafly's Eagle Forum is openly opposing her.
This opposition to Miers shows that even Bush's most loyal supporters no longer trust his judgment. Members of the Religious Right are finally admitting to themselves that Bush is a poor judge of people who surrounds himself with crooked cronies, like Rove, and incompetent cronies, like Brown. Back in happier days, Bush could claim that at his first meeting with Putin, Bush looked into Putin's eyes and was able to see his soul. Now people are doubting Bush's judgment of his long time associates.
To reassure his followers about Miers, during his press conference Tuesday Bush invoked the word "philosophy" 11 times, promising Americans that he and Miers shared the same philosophy:
She shares my philosophy that judges should strictly interpret the laws and the Constitution of the United States, and not legislate from the bench.
And less coherently, but more clearly expressing the "just trust me" theme:
I said, vote for me, this is the kind of judges I'll put on the bench. And there should be no doubt in anybody's mind what I believe a judge -- the philosophy of a judge. And Harriet Miers shares that philosophy.
But what does an incurious man like Bush know of philosophy? In his most famous pronouncement on the topic, Bush claimed that his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ. Bush's pitch is this: "Trust me, I know Harriet, and she's a solid adherent of the WWJD school of jurisprudence." These days, not even Phyllis Schlafly is buying that line.