I'm with Kuttner; I doubt anyone at 1600 Penn tried to talk her out of it.
Fred Barnes , who chided conservatives for abandoning Miers too early, as I mentioned, adopts a positive spin:
"The withdrawal of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers is the first step on the road to political recovery for President Bush. It gives him the opportunity to select a well-known judicial conservative for the Court vacancy, rally conservatives who opposed or were skeptical of Miers, and rebuild his political base.
"Winning confirmation won't be easy. Democrats already have their story down: Bush capitulated to the far right in jettisoning Miers and his new nominee will be a right-wing extremist. My guess is Democrats will stick to this narrative no matter whom the president chooses from the roster of a dozen or more conservatives with strong credentials and deep experience in constitutional law.
"But a fight would be good for Bush. Battling for a highly qualified nominee, this time with conservatives on his side, would hasten the consolidation of his base. And if he's going to accomplish anything significant in the three-plus years left in his second term, he needs his base. He'll also have Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist with him enthusiastically--and prepared to impose the 'nuclear option' to shut off a Democratic filibuster if necessary.
Andrew Sullivan gives credit where it's due:
"This is a big coup for the Washington conservative intellectual establishment and the counter-intelligentsia that has been deliberately built to tackle the left's academic monopoly these last couple of decades. They wanted one of their own on the Court, and they'll get one. At the very least, they have shown they have a veto against anyone too patently unqualified. Given Miers' credentials and post-nomination performance, we may have reason to be grateful for their clout. Score one for Frum!
"Second, it's again amazing how unable this president is to take full responsibility for his decisions and choices. Face-saving is not an unusual thing in politics. But equally it is never a sign of real strength. A strong president takes responsibility for his own choices, even if he feels misunderstood or misled. Reagan's Iran-Contra confession was an example of someone strong enough to admit a failure. This president is not internally strong enough to do something similar. His strength is a form of brittleness. Like all brittleness, it is prone to cracking suddenly and without warning. It just did."
Glenn Reynolds says the blogosphere could have saved W.:
"This was a noble and necessary thing to do, given that the nomination was a dreadful mistake from the beginning. In fact, if the White House had been reading blogs it might not have been blindsided.
"Then again, after doing such a masterful job with the Roberts nomination, the White House shouldn't have needed to read the blogs to get it right. Why they went with Miers is a mystery to me. As I've said elsewhere, when you nominate someone who's, well, a crony, you should be locked-and-loaded to respond to charges of cronyism. Instead, the White House was caught flat-footed."
Right Wing News has a picture of a dancing Snoopy at the top of the page:
"First of all, thank God! I cannot even begin to tell you how happy this makes me. In fact, I actually whooped so hard when I heard she withdrew that I scared the dog...
"This is such a great moment, such a great day for conservatism! In fact, to celebrate, I'm grilling steak tonight. Oh man, it's just such a win. I mean they say you can't fight City Hall? Well, conservatives just fought the White House and won!"
John Hinderaker says not everyone on the right hated the nomination:
"I feel sorry for Miers; she was caught in a crossfire, and never really had a chance to speak for herself. But what we've seen so far may be only a tune-up for what awaits the next nominee.
"A lot of conservative pundits are feeling triumphant today, but there are millions of rank and file Republicans who supported the Miers nomination, many of whom--including many dyed in the wool conservatives--believed, rightly or wrongly, that the criticism of Miers from the right was arrogant and elitist. Miers was a poor choice for a number of reasons, not least because her nomination needlessly divided the party.
"There are lots of sighs of relief, and understandably so; but they're premature, I think. Who knows who the next nominee might be? The beginning of the Miers problem was that President Bush committed to naming a woman before he had a woman lined up for the job. We know that he chose Miers only after 'several' women turned him down. We don't know how many said no, or who they were; so at this point, no one knows who is left in the 'woman' pool. I really hope that at this point, Bush forgets about diversity and nominates the best person for the job. But is there any reason to assume that he will do so?"
On the liberal side, Kos says Harriet basically failed the smell test:
"It seems to me that Miers wasn't done in from a lack of conservative cred as the wingers want to believe. Bush was convinced she was like him and would've fought for her all the way through. She was done in from simple incompetence. Her responses to committee questions betrayed a complete lack of understanding of constitutional law. Her meager writings were incoherent. She was unable to articulate competence in meetings with senators.
"Give Miers the same set of facts but with Judge Roberts' obvious competence on legal issues, and she gets confirmed. She wasn't done in because the crazies flipped. She was done in because she simply wasn't competent to sit on the High Court and it was so painfully obvious."
Josh Marshall reaches a similar conclusion:
"Despite the thunderings on the right, this nomination didn't go down because it had so many enemies or because those enemies were so strong. It went down because the nomination never found any reliable bank of defenders. She had no allies. And the White House was too enfeebled to create them."
Who will be the next nominee? Let the speculation begin!
