While that candor may have won her the newspaper's endorsement, it also created difficulties for her politically.
AIDS was ravaging the gay community, and Miers agreed to meet with activists to hear their concerns. But when she told them she could not support the repeal of a Texas law banning sodomy, some threatened to stage a "die-in" outside the business of Craig Holcomb, an openly gay council member who had endorsed her candidacy. Holcomb called Miers and apologetically asked her not to use his name anymore.
"She took it in stride," Holcomb said. Ironically, the questionnaire she filled out for the Lesbian/Gay Political Coalition of Dallas has now become fodder for conservatives who oppose her nomination, because in it she also said that she supported equal rights for gays.
In another instance, candidate Miers agreed to sit down with a group of abortion rights activists. Operation Rescue was staging regular protests at area abortion clinics, and the group of about 10 women who met with Miers wanted to know whether she supported a 1985 city ordinance that protected patients from harassment. Four of the women in attendance said in interviews that Miers was immovable.
"She said, well, I'm sorry, it's murder, and that's that," said Joy Mankoff, founder of a local women's political action network. "There was no room for any discussion."
Although the women left the meeting convinced that Miers was completely opposed to abortion rights, one, liberal lawyer Louise B. Raggio, continued to support Miers and still does. Miers, for her part, has raised money to promote a lecture series on women's issues bearing Raggio's name. The first speaker was feminist Gloria Steinem.
"The abortion issue is a bad issue for me," Raggio acknowledged, "but overall you look at the whole, and there are many issues I could agree with her on."
With the support of the business community, a network of lawyers from the city's prestigious law firms and former football coach Tom Landry, Miers handily won in a run-off election in the nonpartisan race. Abortion and gay rights were not issues in the election.
Elsewhere in Texas, conservatives on councils were voting to add language to city charters stating that life begins at conception. But once elected, Miers steered clear of abortion. Perhaps the most controversial symbolic action Miers took was to support a resolution asking Congress to amend the Constitution to ban flag burning. The vote was 11 to 0.
For the most part, Miers operated in the background, leaving her colleagues perplexed about her political ideology. She also had a tendency to switch stances on critical issues, a trait supporters said showed her thoughtfulness but that critics labeled indecision.
"We spent about 1,200 hours together and had in excess of 6,000 agenda items, and I never knew where Harriet was going to be on any of those items until she cast her vote," former council colleague Jim Buerger said. "I wouldn't consider her a liberal, a moderate or a conservative, and I can't honestly think of any cause she championed."
If Miers rarely pushed her own agenda, she readily plunged into the middle of the biggest civil rights controversies of the day, winning the respect of council members such as Diane Ragsdale, a firebrand African American whom many in the white establishment loved to hate. "Early on, Harriet asked me what could she do to improve conditions for my constituents," Ragsdale said. "She was always about fairness."
