On the Right, Caught in the Middle

Frum, 45, is an intense but gregarious writer and the author of five books who enjoys throwing parties with his wife, the novelist and essayist Danielle Crittenden Frum, in the huge back yard of their Wesley Heights home. A former editor for Forbes and the Wall Street Journal editorial page who moved here in 1996, Frum returns periodically to Canada, where he writes a column for the National Post.

Frum drew some unwanted attention shortly before leaving the Bush White House in early 2002 when his wife told friends in an e-mail (which leaked to the world) that he had helped coin the phrase "axis of evil" for the president's post-9/11 State of the Union address. In early 2003, Frum published "The Right Man," a mostly positive book about Bush that nonetheless contained some tart observations.

The president "is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill-informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader should be," Frum wrote. Although the book was no kiss-and-tell, it did not endear him to White House loyalists.

When Bush nominated Miers on Sept. 29 at an 8 a.m. news conference, Frum raced to his home computer and wrote that "Harriet Miers is a capable lawyer, a hard worker, and a kind and generous person," but hardly Supreme Court material.

"In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met."

Suddenly, Frum was deluged with media requests. He appeared on "NBC Nightly News," ABC's "World News Tonight," CNN and National Public Radio.

He has stayed on the offense for National Review Online, writing that if conservatives accept the Miers nomination, they "will be jettisoning every principle in favor of just this one: the leader is always right. That's not just unconservative. It's un-American." This week, he felt compelled to deny that he has "some secret personal motive" for opposing Miers.

"My conservatism is about ideas, not personalities," he wrote. "It is very dispiriting to me that we have reached a point where the honest expression of a conscientious belief is interpreted by many to be a disguised expression of a personal animus."

The attacks on Frum, says National Review Editor Rich Lowry, "are arguments of last resort when you have nothing better to say. . . . He's close to these people, so it's particularly hard to say things he knows they're going to take major exception to. It's very principled and courageous of him to be so out front on this from Day One."

After taking a Yom Kippur blogging break, Frum helped draft a petition against Miers for conservatives to sign, which quickly garnered 3,000 signatures. "It is madness," he wrote last week, "for a 37% president to declare war on his strongest supporters, but that is exactly the strategy that this unwise nomination has forced upon President Bush."

Punctured Tire

The ad submitted to the Detroit News was not exactly subtle.

Toyota and Hyundai operate "in countries that sponsor terrorism," it said, while General Motors does not.

Jim Doyle of the Level Field Institute, funded by retirees and suppliers of the Big Three automakers, says the News questioned the assertion, which he explained was based on State Department findings about Sudan and Iran. Then a News advertising executive told him the ad was being rejected because her bosses had decided it was "inflammatory to our advertisers." Says Doyle: "I didn't expect to get censored in Detroit."

The same ad, by the way, has run in Roll Call and been accepted by The Washington Post for this week.

So was the News protecting its automobile advertisers? Henry Ford, the paper's vice president for marketing, says he has "no comment other than it was a simple business decision."