The White House under siege

Oct 27th 2005
From The Economist print edition

As speculation intensifies over possible indictments of senior Bush administration officials in "Plamegate", Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination for America’s Supreme Court. But the president's problems go much deeper than a much-derided lawyer and a zealous special prosecutor

AS SPECULATION reached fever pitch on Thursday October 27th, it was still not clear who, if anyone, was to be indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in “Plamegate”. But since those being probed included America’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, his chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and President George Bush’s most valued adviser, Karl Rove, the investigation clearly had the potential to knock the administration into a ditch. As if that were not enough trouble for the president, many conservatives are furious with the White House. Mr Bush’s naming of his personal lawyer, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court attracted so many conservative brickbats that Ms Miers withdrew her name from consideration on Thursday morning.

Mr Bush was doubtless surprised, after picking Ms Miers on October 3rd, at just how much his social-conservative base hated the idea of her sitting on the top court. It was not her beliefs that irked them—Ms Miers is a born-again Christian who disapproves of abortion. But she did not appear to come close to the level of constitutional expertise required of a Supreme Court justice. A questionnaire she completed for the Senate Judiciary Committee was sent back because members found her responses “inadequate” and even “insulting”. Two new conservative websites, www.withdrawmiers.org and www.betterjustice.com, were set up to prevent her confirmation.

For social conservatives, the Supreme Court is the crucial battleground. As they see it, liberal activist judges have twisted the constitution to ban prayer in schools and allow abortion-on-demand. Another fight is looming over gay marriage, which judges have legalised in Massachusetts and which social conservatives fear could spread to other states and undermine traditional wedlock.

Until this month, social conservatives were satisfied with the judges Mr Bush had appointed. His picks for lower courts were typically both conservative and well-qualified, as was his first pick for the Supreme Court, John Roberts, now chief justice. In naming Ms Miers, however, conservatives thought Mr Bush had avoided a fight he could have won; Republicans have a 55-45 majority in the Senate, which confirms judicial nominations. With Ms Miers gone, Mr Bush can pick someone who will please his natural supporters. But even if he manages to put the Miers saga behind him, he still has plenty of other problems.

Mr Fitzgerald was due to end his investigation this week. The case concerns the alleged leaking of the name of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame. Since Ms Plame was an undercover agent, albeit one who worked in the unhazardous environment of Virginia, to blow her cover deliberately would be a serious crime. She was first outed in a column by Robert Novak in July 2003. The questions the grand jury must ponder are: who leaked her name to journalists? Did they realise at the time that she was a covert agent, rather than an ordinary one? And has anyone perjured himself or obstructed the investigation, both of which could be cause for indictment?

The background to the case is that shortly before Ms Plame was unmasked, her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, derided Mr Bush’s claim, in the state-of-the-union address in January 2003, that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa. Mr Wilson had been sent to Niger the previous year by the CIA to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium there. He concluded that he had not, and professed surprise that Mr Bush apparently ignored his report.

A Senate committee later found that Mr Wilson had mis-stated crucial facts in his conversations with reporters. But that will not help the likely targets of Mr Fitzgerald’s probe if they are found to have leaked Ms Plame’s name to imply that Mr Wilson had got the CIA job for nepotistic reasons.

Judith Miller of the New York Times, who served 85 days in jail for at first refusing to testify, now says that Mr Libby told her Mr Wilson’s wife was in the CIA. Matthew Cooper of Time says that Mr Rove was his source for the same information. The New York Times reported this week that Mr Libby first learned of Ms Plame’s identity from his boss, Mr Cheney. If Mr Libby and/or Mr Rove are indicted, they will almost certainly have to resign.

There is never a good time to lose one’s brain, but Mr Bush has picked a terrible one. Liberals have labelled Mr Rove “Bush’s brain” not only to belittle the commander-in-chief’s intellect, but also because they recognise his top strategist’s brilliance. Mr Rove masterminded Mr Bush’s four election victories (two for governor of Texas and two for the presidency), largely by showing him how to energise his conservative base. If Mr Rove goes, Mr Bush will have lost his sheepdog just as his flock is starting to jump the fences.

Social conservatives may be satisfied for now, but fiscal conservatives are bellowing about the deficit. Nativists are growling about immigration. And foreign-policy hawks are shrieking about the mishandling of the Iraq war. All this is far more worrying for Mr Bush than anything Democrats might say about him. If he loses the backing of conservative America, his legislative agenda will wither.

As the toll of American deaths in Iraq topped 2,000 this week, two conservative foreign-policy heavyweights sniped at Mr Bush’s handling of the war. Last week, Larry Wilkerson, a former chief-of-staff to Colin Powell at the State Department, claimed that a “cabal” including Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, had made decisions in secret and then presented them “in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.” He said that America would look back in shame at the carte blanche given to its soldiers to torture detainees—a timely remark, as the White House tries to have the CIA exempted from new torture rules.

This week the New Yorker published comments from Brent Scowcroft, who was national-security adviser to the first President Bush, in which he excoriated the neo-con vision of exporting democracy by force. “You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the traditional way. Not how the neo-cons do it,” he said. “This was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism.”

On another front, deficit hawks joined the fray. According to Citizens Against Government Waste, a pressure group, Congress approved 13,997 projects geared towards special-interest groups this year, nearly a tenfold increase in a decade. Mr Bush has yet to veto a single one. Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, called on him to veto all future bills containing pork.

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, argued that the right used to “swallow policies we might otherwise have objected to because we’ve believed that [Mr Bush is] trying to do the right thing against sometimes terrible odds. No more. From now on, this administration will find it difficult to muster support on the right without explaining why it should be forthcoming.”

So far, the conservative revolt against Mr Bush is largely confined to the intelligentsia. Ordinary Republican voters feel no great horror about future deficits or the process by which decisions about national security are made. But they may grow more restless if evangelical preachers take against Mr Bush’s next Supreme Court pick, or if the situation in Iraq gets worse.

The conservative crack-up is not yet serious enough to ruin Mr Bush’s second term. The news from Iraq is not all bad: a new constitution has just been approved, and Saddam Hussein is in the dock. Some congressional Republicans are proposing modest spending cuts, and Mr Bush still has the power to veto bloated bills, if he cares to use it. The Miers mess seems to have been resolved.

But the split between Mr Bush and many conservative intellectuals is “very deep and probably irreparable”, reckons Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to Ronald Reagan, who was recently sacked from a conservative think-tank for writing a book called “The Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy”. And that fury could spread to the grassroots, especially if some of the hopefuls for the Republican presidential nomination make a show of sounding more conservative than Mr Bush on abortion, gay rights or immigration.

If Mr Bush’s approval rating sinks—and most polls put it around 40%—he will find it ever harder to make Congress do what he wants. He badly needs to kiss and make up with his base, but that will be hard if his most effective pair of lips is sealed. Mr Rove is unlikely, as lefty comedian Al Franken suggested last week, to be executed for treason. But his political survival is far from assured, and who else could win back the conservatives who think Mr Bush a traitor to their cause?

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