Splitting Heirs: Harriet (and) The Spy…

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.
–Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Harriet Miers is finally finished and not a moment too soon. What’s interesting about this story is not so much that Bush’s own troop fragged him this time around, but the split that it reveals within the Republican party’s base that has been spackled over for the past five years with platitudes about ‘values’ and distractions about the real agendas.

We just watched a particularly bitter family quarrel and it stems from the fracture that lies at the heart of the increasingly tense alliance between the evangelical wing of the neo-conservative movement and the business interests that comprise the real and more powerful base of the party. That’s important because it can illuminate what might happen next as Bush tries to get something to go his way—as Dylan famously remarked: “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows”, and make no mistake about it, those are category five winds blowing around the capital in the hurricane du jour that now starts with Greek letters because we’ve exhausted the alphabet (?!)

The administration is in a bind. Approval ratings are low. The body count in Iraq reached a symbolic watermark at the same time as it looks like indictments are to be handed down to administration officials, approval ratings are in the toilet, Florida is the latest state to be visited by the poor response of FEMA underscoring the lack of our preparedness when visited with disaster and Richard Clarke noted two days ago that the number of attacks from insurgents spawned by Al Qaeda morphed organizations have actually increased in a post 9-11world globally when you add up the incidents and casualties, rather than decreased. Bush is feeling a bit like Napoleon after Waterloo and needs to be cheered up by Turdblossom about as much (Sure, it hurts to be defeated by a guy with a first name like “Beef”, but now you can take that vacation on a nice secluded island, now you won’t have to listen to any more short jokes, now you can stop wearing that ridiculous hat, NOW comes Miller time).

The next pick is problematical for a number of reasons. The evangelical wing of the party is hungry for their red meat conservative destined to overturn Roe V. Wade, and a pick like Brown could, as Dickerson notes energize the base and create a knock down drag out fight that would distract people from the forthcoming legal and political battles over the fallout of the Plame investigation and shore up the splintering base.

The problem with that approach is that it’s simplistic, fails to look beyond the immediate political need, discounts nuance and planning for the future and relies upon distracting people from substantive issues in favor of shallow sound bites. In other words, it’s perfect for this administration and right in keeping with what has served them so well, and us so poorly.

Using a knock down drag out battle over the next nominee to distract from any forthcoming indictments is a dangerous gambit because it’s likely to encourage a Democratic filibuster and the Republicans can hardly hurl the ‘playing politics’ smear after nominating someone who’s so qualification is a willingness to do what they want on the Supreme Court and no contrail or qualifications to speak of.

More dangerously for the administration in terms of consequences, it gives the Democrats exactly the weapon they’ve been lacking—a way to look moderate and sensible in the face of extremism and they get to defend a moderate agenda in doing so. Creating a food fight in the cafeteria over a nomination may distract from the indictments, but it also allows the Democrats to occupy the high ground and lay claim to principled moderation in filibustering a pick designed around specific actions on the bench—call that, Oh, I don’t know… activism.

THAT’S risky business, because the problem with this family fight is that when you split the heirs to this coalition the favored child, the legacy, is the moneyed corporate interests, and getting between that constituency and its tax cuts is a losing proposition. The constituency that really influences this administration (follow the money) doesn’t mind the ostentatiously religious until they interfere with business, and they are still smarting over Bush making them look foolish with the Miers nomination and having to slap down Bush.

A high stakes battle that revolves around social issues may well distract from the indictments, but battles over social and religious policy agendas can also focus on taxation policies and that’s bad for business when your business is tax cuts, deficit spending on pork and returns on those ‘investments’ that don’t deliver as promised, like ‘better disaster response’

A messy fight over the next nominee sounds like a good idea to many Republicans and Republican strategists. It’s simple and distracting—just like the rationale for invading Iraq. Which is how we got into this mess in the first place. Careful what you wish for. You may well get it, and if in the process it makes the Democrats look like the party of moderation—socially, fiscally, militarily and more dangerously, politically in the wake of mismanagement by the administration than a brawl won’t unite the troops—it will undermine the leaders.

There’s a split in the family, a fracture amongst the heirs. They don’t need another fight—they need a responsible and mature leader with a sense of where they’re going and vision to foresee the consequences. They’re in the wrong house.

In the end, it’s always the cumulative effect that gets you.

When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
–Jacob Riis