Right-wingers treated Miers like dirt

By WILLIAM McKENZIE
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
One thing's for certain about this Harriet Miers mess: The conservative movement can never, ever play the Bork card again. No more whining about liberals tarring-and-feathering Robert Bork in his 1987 Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
For two decades, conservative activists have droned on about their spiritual leader's defeat in the Senate. They carry him around on their shoulders as proof of how the establishment's out to get them.
Well, forget that nonsense.
No more of that cry-babying, not after what conservatives like writer David Frum and organizations like Concerned Women of America -- using the National Review and Wall Street Journal opinion-page megaphones -- have done to Harriet Miers in two short weeks.
They've turned a woman whose credentials for the Supreme Court matched or outpaced those of William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor into the image of a naive, untested first-year law student.
A Texas Republican I spoke with this week, who knows Miers well, put it best: "I don't know this woman they're talking about."
Never mind that she never got a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Never mind that Americans in Dubuque, Seattle and Paducah didn't get to hear her open her mouth. Never mind that she didn't get to defend her credentials. And never mind that she probably would have satisfied most conservatives.
They knew best. And to mess with "them" is like running up against those who marched around the fourth-grade playground with a swagger that let everyone else know who's in charge.
Conservative pundit Ann Coulter sure swaggered her way through a CNN interview Thursday. She talked about how the conservative movement now has the power in this country. You could hear her glee as she pined for a Senate battle over a truly conservative nominee.
Maybe the only good thing to come out of the Miers assassination is that it presents the country a teaching moment. Americans outside the Beltway finally get to see what's going on in their capital. This idea that Washington is a liberal city is a myth. It once was, but it is no longer. Conservatives rule the place. Heck, they just beat the president of the United States in a showdown.
Conservative clout
When you look around the town, or even flip through a political directory, you find conservative organizations like the Free Congress Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform and Club for Growth. They're the ones with the clout. They're the ones that even Democrats must pay heed. Otherwise, you stand to get clubbed, the way a solid business conservative like Harriet Miers did.
Yes, there are older institutions within the conservative movement that play well with others. The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation come to mind. They have an agenda, but you can find their experts working with scholars from the Democratic Leadership Council or the Brookings Institution. That's the kind of intellectual interplay that Washington needs.
But many of their peers don't play interplay. They want it their way. And they will simply run off anyone who stands between them and their agenda.
This is no different from the left's preferred practice. The National Abortion Rights Action League, People for the American Way and Alliance for Justice play the same game. That's why they tore Robert Bork limb from limb. And that's why it was extraordinarily hypocritical for Ralph Neas of the People for the American Way to slap his forehead Thursday and decry how much the right bullied Miers into submission
The difference is, Neas and the left don't have the power these days. The right does, and I'm not talking about your average conservative in the suburbs of Dallas or Atlanta. I'm talking about the paid professionals who have a ton of skin in the Washington game. They're the ones to hold accountable for the way the town works.
Maybe the power boys and girls on the right like the present state of things, true believers practicing the art of political marksmanship. But I'll bet the rest of the country doesn't. As my Texas Republican friend said, "Washington's a sick place."
X William McKenzie is an editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.