Just at the moment there's a fever pitch to withdraw her, I've gone from nervousness about the choice (but trust in the Prez.) to a certain feeling of confidence. Yesterday I started to notice that Harriet Miers' critics (from among those who know her or have worked with her) tend to be anonymous, while she gets glowing praise from people willing to speak on the record. And the typical criticism is that she was an anal-retentive school-marm who corrected spelling and grammar while serving as staff secretary. Sample:
Others held a less charitable view. Some colleagues "really felt she was the place where the action stopped and the hand-wringing began," said a former administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Maybe this is true. But from experience in too many Washington offices, the impression I get is of young, full-of-themselves turks in DC. Their attitude: "I'm trying to save the world and she's troubling me about apostrophe use!" They seem not to like Miss Miers because she didn't let them turn poor grammar & spelling in to the President of the United States. I certainly understand why they'd feel frustrated, but with all due respect, she was right --and probably helping their careers to boot. Looking at this must-read Matthew Scully piece in today's NYT, my impression is confirmed. The self-absorbed seem not to like her; those with their eye on the ball do (I speak of those of her acquaintance). A few excerpts:
Overlooked in all this caviling is the actual ability and character of the person in question. Indeed, about the best quality to recommend Harriet Miers just now is that she is not at all the sort of person who goes about readily and confidently dismissing other people as third-raters, hacks and mediocrities. She has too much class for that.
It is true that Harriet Miers, in everything she does, gives high attention to detail. And the trait came in handy with drafts of presidential speeches, in which she routinely exposed weak arguments, bogus statistics and claims inconsistent with previous remarks long forgotten by the rest of us. If one speech declared X "our most urgent domestic priority," and another speech seven months earlier had said it was Y, it would be Harriet Miers alone who noted the contradiction.
Scully thinks that attention to detail would make Miers highly likely to ask little questions such as, "Does the Court really have the power to do this?" My kinda justice. More:
The accounts of the nominee's work habits are also true. But even better, when the lights went on at 5:30 a.m. or so in office of the staff secretary or the legal counsel, she was not starting the day with a scan of the newspapers in search of her own name. [Ouch! And SO accurate!]
And all of us who leave our White House jobs and go on to write and trade on our service to the president could stand to learn more from Harriet Miers about service to a president. Whenever she was in the room, calmly listening and observing, you knew that on any matter, great or small, at least one person involved had in mind only the interests of the president, the office and the nation.
Says Scully: when people in the spotlight want to know what Harriet Miers has been doing all these years, the answer is "Something Useful." (Burn!) And the conclusion, with its tantalizing hints of the future.
Although it is conceivable that President Bush has had his fill of advice from overreaching pundits, that is not why he chose Harriet Miers. Maybe he didn't want somebody who had been planning for 20 years for a place on the Supreme Court. Maybe he has looked around every so often and noticed that the least assuming person in the room was also the most capable and discerning. Or maybe he remembered how the hardest-working person in the White House found time to prepare the will of a terminally ill 27-year-old colleague, and to spend nights and mornings staying with her and praying with her.
Whatever his reasons, what America got is a nominee of enormous legal ability and ferocious integrity, and in the bargain a gracious Christian woman only more qualified for her new role because she would never have sought it for herself. And in a few years, when the same critics we hear now are extolling the clarity, consistency and perhaps even the "brilliance" of judicial opinions, that's when you'll know it's the Miers court.
If Miers' nomination isn't scuttled and the President turns out to be right, will any of the pundits apologize for the flat-out mean and un-called for criticisms they've made? And for their grossly patronizing columns about how the Prez could "gracefully" withdraw? I'll be collecting the apologies.
