It was without a doubt his most awful week in the 248 weeks he has been in the White House.
President Bush accepts Harriet Miers’ decision to withdraw as a nominee for the Supreme Court; I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, is indicted on five felony charges of lying to investigators and misleading the grand jury in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case; and the nation mourns as the death toll of American GIs, lost to the war in Iraq, reaches the milestone of 2000. All of which deepens the air of crisis in the White House and raises questions about how the president will hold out in the 39 months remaining in his presidency.
Texans, they tell you down there, don’t back down. Yet last week the most prominent Texan of them all had to eat humble pie, take it on the chin, and do just that. And there’s no spinning it any other way.
President Bush last Thursday withdrew his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court after Republican allies on the Hill and right-leaning activists in his party brought into doubt her qualifications for the job and her conservative credentials.
With the fear factor gone in his second term in office, the president clearly had miscalculated when he opted to bypass the proper selection process as he chose Miers, his onetime personal lawyer and White House council, to replace Sandra Day O’Connor as a Supreme Court justice. He ignored warnings that her confirmation before the Senate Judiciary Committee would prove difficult.
Indeed, over a period of three weeks and three days, Miers was grilled at the Justice Department by Bush administration officials in a staged enactment of the grueling questioning that they knew would be directed at a Supreme Court nominee by members of the Judiciary Committee. Her responses were found wanting, to say the least.
Bush, a confident second-term president who has insulated himself from criticism, misjudged badly when he assumed that his Republican base, and the conservative punditocracy that backed him, would go along with his nomination of someone whose only qualification for such high office appeared to be her personal loyalty to him.
A Supreme Court justice occupies a seat in the highest court of the land because of his or her competence as a jurist well versed in constitutional law. In this case, even Republican loyalists were reluctant to rubber-stamp such a legal lightweight. The problem with Miers was not her conservative views, in law as in politics — for truth be told no one knew precisely what her views were. What little she had published has been described as “vacuous.” Very simply, she lacked the qualifications to sit on the nation’s highest court.
Also last week, we were witness to an embattled White House circling the wagons as it anticipated indictments of two top administration aides in the CIA leaks, I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior advisor, charged with making false statements to the grand jury.
As special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald prepared to conclude his investigation and the jury to announce its verdict on Friday, Libby, who could see the writing on the wall, had already shopped around for a high-profile criminal lawyer, and Rove began assembling a public relations team in the event he was indicted. At the White House, a political strategy was devised to respond to the fallout, as chief of staff Andrew Card canceled at least two official trips and met twice with Bush to focus on how to react to the grand jury’s decisions.
A republican consultant with close administration ties was quoted by the Washington Post as saying that, according to Card, “These will be very, very dark days for the White House.
Washington held its breath.
Rove escaped indictment — for now. Libby, however, was slapped with one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of making false statements to FBI investigators and two counts of lying to the grand jury. Should he be convicted, he would be looking at a maximum of 30 years behind bars in a federal penitentiary.
Meanwhile, the death toll of American servicemen in Iraq, reaching the landmark figure of 2000 on Tuesday, came as a reminder of a war that a majority of Americans have now come to deem unnecessary and unwinnable, a war that should not have happened and a war predicated, it turns out, on deception — those weapons of mass destruction, yellow cake from Niger, Saddam’s connection to international terrorism, and rest of it, were clearly bogus — and on fantasies about “democratizing” the entire region via a friendly government in Baghdad.
The giddiness that characterized the early days of the invasion has been replaced in official Washington by gloom, and the anxiety of the public is markedly expressed in the polls, which have Bush’s approval rating dropping to 39 percent, the lowest recorded in his presidency. In an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird writes that in Iraq the administration has one option and one option only — to devise an exit strategy, and the sooner the better.
Yet President Bush, who has not given the country a legitimate reason for going to war, or advanced a strategy guaranteed to win it, is determined, against all odds and against the national mood, to “stay the course.” Soon after the news was announced last week that the 2000-death milestone had been reached, he said in a speech: “This war will require more sacrifice, more time and more resolve. No one should underestimate the difficulties ahead, nor should they overlook the advantages we bring to this fight.”
The American president’s descent from a cocky, overconfident leader, running an administration that was dismissive of the international community’s complaints about its unilateralism, to running an embattled one in crisis today, has been unexpected. Its recovery, should it come, will be slow and difficult. This at a time when the country is deeply polarized.
The implosion of the Miers nomination, the indictment of Libby and the death toll in Iraq — attesting to the messy quagmire the US finds itself in over there — are all emblematic of a broader question: Whom to entrust with the daunting task of leading a big power the impact of whose actions, as they are diffused outwardly around the world, never fail, in time, to affect the destiny of numerous nations and communities everywhere on this planet? That’s the responsibility that comes with the job of being a big power and a world leader. It is doubtful, however, that President Bush has the intellectual depth, or his administration the penetrative grasp, to creatively shoulder that responsibility.
