I’ve heard enough of them from enough different people that I’m willing to make a tentative prediction about how this will be remembered. Much of this is conjecture and hunch, of course. Here is what I think historians will say:
Bush/the White House decided for whatever reason (Senate pressure, polling, etc) they needed to pick a woman. They went through a list and found that many of their top female candidates weren’t confirmable or had quantifiable problems (we’ve heard mention that some had suprising “activism” in their records. I think Brit Hume even said so on TV on Sunday). Meanwhile, by the time they reached Miers’ name they’d already bought so deeply into the “logic” of picking a woman they couldn’t back out and Bush felt so strongly about Miers and the vetting was so poor they felt she made the most sense as a reliable “stealth” nominee. The added pressure that Bush and others think so highly of Miers contributed to the inability of wiser heads to say “Maybe we should go another way” or “Maybe we should give her a more thorough vetting.” Then they cleared her with Dobson and a few other evangelicals who they mistakenly believed were perfectly good stand-ins for the entire conservative movement. When the blowback on Miers hit from the wider conservative world, they were caught off-guard and fell back on bad arguments (she’s loyal, she’s evangelical, she was a fair and honest lottery commissioner) because they had so little ammo in her record.
Then — and this is the moment we’re in now — they got stuck in a two front war. In order to placate conservatives they needed to demonstrate that she is really a rightwinger. But for every reassurance they offer to the right, they sow more doubt on the left — including among squishy moderates like Arlen Specter (who, by the way, Hugh Hewitt carried so much water for against a real conservative). This created an incentive for the squishes and the lefties to buy into the “she’s not qualified” argument as a way to seem tolerant to both her ideology and her gender and make Bush look bad. Eventually, the surprises in her relatively unvetted-record added complaints on both sides. She withdrew before the vote.
Obviously this last bit is wild conjecture. But that’s my gut feeling as of 1:51 PM, October 11, 2005. And while much of this may not pan out, I think the trust-Bush-he’s-got-a-secret-plan theory will not hold up to scrutiny when more facts are known. She may still turn out to be a great justice, but it will have been a Hail-Harriet pass not some brilliant executed strategy.