Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and Michael Brown. Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Bill Frist. And now Harriet Miers.
Iraq, Social Security, high gas prices, Katrina, Wilma, and Iraq again.
And Harriet Miers.
Miers is not under indictment or investigation. In fact, there is every reason to believe that up to this point she has served honorably. And there is nothing to suggest she is a natural, political, or economic disaster.
But the withdrawal of her nomination will be regarded as a political blow to the president that's equal to the one inflicted by Katrina or by the indictment of Rove or Libby. Her withdrawal seems just another chapter in the Great GOP Unraveling of 2005.
Indeed, the Miers withdrawal could be the event that causes the whole Bush agenda to collapse -- unless, of course, that has already happened. If there was a presidential election last weekend instead of the World Series, George W. Bush, it seems, would have been swept, losing 55 percent to 39 percent. In the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll released on Tuesday, 55 percent of the respondents said that they would vote for the Democratic candidate if Bush were up for re-election this year. Timing is everything.
The president explained the pullback on Miers as a strategic retreat to preserve the functioning of the executive branch. “It is clear that senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White House,” he said, “… disclosures that would undermine a president's ability to receive candid counsel.”
In truth, it may be that the president received too much candid counsel from his own right wing. They have certainly been on fire -- from the moment he nominated Miers. That was his biggest problem.
They ran negative ads against him on FOX News calling her nomination “a disaster on every level”: “Even the best leaders make mistakes. Conservatives support President Bush but not Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers,” said the ad's voiceover.
Perhaps you'd be shocked to learn there is a split in the Democratic ranks about what the best strategy is in dealing with the Republican meltdown. And it may be too early to say whether that disagreement, slight and inconsequential as it now seems, could produce yet again another disappointing result for Democrats on the next Election Day.
The basic question is what Democrats should be doing now to take political advantage of the moment. In one corner, Democrats are saying, “Stay out of their way and just let them hang themselves.”
Then there are those who see that strategy as not active enough; that Democrats should be out there touting themselves as an alternative, making sure that people understand they are engaged, involved, and ready.
The let-them-hang-themselves crowd worry that too much Democratic input has the potential to turn the conversation into a partisan confrontation that could allow the GOP to fight back with political arguments, the gist of which would be that Democrats are just playing politics to bring down an administration they have always hated.
Democrats who wish for a robust engagement need to ponder this question: Which party has done a better job of turning the American people against the GOP in the last five years, Republicans or Democrats?
Republicans, of course. And since Democrats have been so generally ineffective on that front, there is an argument for staying out of the way of their self-mutilation.The White House is losing the ability to set the agenda, and that is costing Bush. It will benefit Democrats nothing, however, if they have nothing to say when the time comes. In that case they should do a Miers: Go home.
Terence Samuel is the former chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
