Facing unprecedented and ferocious challenges on a variety of fronts, the White House is suddenly adopting a shocking new tactic: Full-out strategic retreat.
Today's withdrawal of Harriet Miers's bedeviled nomination to the Supreme Court is, of course, Exhibit A. But there's also an Exhibit B: The White House's quiet but total cave-in yesterday, reinstating the wage protections for workers involved in Hurricane Katrina reconstruction. (More on that below.)
Strategic retreat of course has two parts. One is retreat. The other is strategy.
For the moment, the Miers withdrawal has certainly taken Washington wonkery's attention away from the looming indictments in the CIA leak case, which are now widely expected to come down tomorrow.
But think it through, and it seems obvious that the Miers withdrawal was timed not to distract from the indictments, but rather to be quickly overshadowed by them.
As Candy Crowley suggested on CNN, if there are indeed indictments tomorrow, the Miers withdrawal will be quickly forgotten. That wipes the slate clean, more or less, and gives President Bush an opportunity to pivot away from the leak scandal with a new Supreme Court nomination sometime in the next week or two.
CNN's Jeff Greenfield also noted that the Miers withdrawal headlines in tomorrow's papers will be a nice gift to Bush's conservative base -- on the very day indictments presumably come down and Bush really needs his most ardent supporters firmly in his court.
I can't possibly keep up with all the Miers developments today. For that, a good first stop is Fred Barbash 's Supreme Court Blog on washingtonpost.com.
I should point out, however, that the White House's move today was both suggested and anticipated a week ago by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer . I quoted Krauthammer in my Friday column and then asked: "Would a Friday night be best? Or a really big news day?"
Answer: The day before a really big news day.
Anyway, I will not be distracted. My focus remains on the CIA leak investigation.
Post-Indictment Strategy
As it happens, this morning's papers are full of interesting speculation about how the White House might respond to the expected indictments. It just needs a touch of updating.
