Grand old crackup?

THE WHITE HOUSE may have endured a barrage of bad news last week, but in one small way, at least, it was a managed barrage: Most White House watchers agree that there was a reason the withdrawal of Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination came when it did, a day before special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, in the CIA leak investigation.

''The idea was to get rid of [Miers] before the bad news of the indictments, and in doing that, energize the conservative base for the upcoming legal woes that the administration may face," says Marshall Wittmann, a former political strategist for both the Christian Coalition and the Heritage Foundation and the communications director of John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. ''The worst thing for the administration was to face legal foes with a weakened base."

Conservatives, who were loudest in denouncing Miers's nomination, are no doubt relieved. But are they reassured? After all, only a few days ago there was still talk of a ''conservative crackup," the dissolution of the conservative coalition forged 25 years ago by Ronald Reagan, and the waning of support for Bush among those Americans who identify themselves as conservatives-those voters, in other words, who have throughout Bush's presidency made up his loudest and most loyal and organized supporters.

''The long-predicted 'conservative crackup' is at hand," Newsweek's chief political correspondent Howard Fineman wrote early this month. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks put it similarly last Sunday: ''We are going through one of our periodic conservative crackups," he wrote, presumably referring to crackups past such as 1964, when Goldwater conservatives seized control of the Republican Party and led it to one of the worst defeats in presidential election history, and 1992, when conservatives abandoned the first President Bush and helped tilt the election to Bill Clinton.

By this logic, the outrage over Miers was fed by a number of grievances that are only tangentially related to her nomination-and which may still trouble the relationship between Bush and his conservative base. Irked by the Bush administration's free-spending tendencies and bitterly divided over the issue of immigration, disconcerted by the continuing bloodshed in Iraq and put off by the whiff of cronyism and mismanagement coming from the White House, the conservative movement's various factions-social, fiscal, supply-side, foreign policy realists, and neoconservatives alike-are either edging out of the Big Tent or fighting over where to pitch it.

Or so the story goes. Much still depends on who Bush nominates in Miers's stead. But according to many of the pollsters, political strategists, and scholars who have made a study of modern American conservativism, one thing is clear: Complain as they may, conservatives still really like Bush.

''There wasn't ever going to be a crackup," says Wittmann, now a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council (and thus something of a conservative apostate). Bush and his conservative base, Wittmann argues, ''were never going to divorce court. They just needed to go to some counseling and therapy."

Presidents always have problems with their wingers," says Michael Barone, the principal author of The Almanac of American Politics and a prominent conservative commentator. One of his earliest political memories, he says, is reading The New Republic's vehement denunciations of the Kennedy administration's insufficiently liberal domestic policies in the early 1960s. What's most notable, Barone believes, ''is that Bush's problems have only become articulated in his fifth year."

Indeed, part of the reason that today's conservative dissent shows up as vividly as it does is that the Bush presidency has been, up until now, a period of remarkable unanimity in both the Republican Party and the conservative movement. A few moderates, like Senator James Jeffords of Vermont and Christine Todd Whitman, former New Jersey governor and Bush's first EPA administrator, have condemned what they saw as a rightward trend in the party. But as a whole, there's been a striking singularity of tone and purpose since Bush took office, with congressional Republicans almost never breaking ranks on party-line votes.

That unity has frayed of late: Earlier this month 46 of the Senate's 55 Republicans voted in favor of a measure-strongly opposed by the White House-to regulate the treatment of prisoners held by the American military. And an indictment of Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, would deprive the conservative coalition, many observers agree, of the man best able to manage its sometimes fractious blocs.

And yet, even before the Miers withdrawal, few saw Bush's situation as analogous to that of his father in 1990, when the elder Bush alienated conservatives by reneging on his pledge not to raise taxes.

''With the first President Bush," Wittmann argues, ''there was no true bond with the conservatives. The first Bush actually got them angry. This President Bush has a deep bond with most of the grass roots of the party. That's been shaken at this point, but it's certainly not in jeopardy."

The numbers would appear to back this up. Although GOP pollster David Winston has seen a drop in support for the president among conservative Republicans, he notes that ''it's from the low to mid-90s to the high 80s"-hardly the kind of numbers that suggest a brewing revolt. A recent CBS News Poll showed similar results.

Winston sees both the Miers backlash and the Fitzgerald investigation as a concern predominantly of elites, not the party's rank and file. To the extent that conservative support has sagged, he argues, it's been less about Miers and Libby than about high gas prices.

Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University and coauthor of ''The Rise of Southern Republicans," points out that even in 1992, with the defection of many conservatives to Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, Republicans still made gains in Southern congressional seats. He sees little chance that the current conservative discontent will translate into Democratic wins in the South.

As Winston puts it, ''Outside the Beltway, conservative Republicans still very much support this president."

In a closely divided country, however, the conservative coalition needn't fall apart for the balance of political power to shift. Since recent elections have turned on which party can more successfully galvanize its base and get supporters to the polls, demoralization rather than outrage might be enough to swing the election, keeping just enough conservatives at home on election day. Barone sees this as a real danger for the Republicans: ''The balance of enthusiasm favored the Republicans in 2002 and 2004, it's possible to think that it will favor the Democrats in 2006 and 2008."

And some observers think the talk of a crackup may not be exaggerated after all. ''When everything a party does seems to be turning out wrong," says Ruy Teixeira, a demographer at the liberal Center for American Progress and coauthor of the book ''The Emerging Democratic Majority," ''the potential for a crackup has to be there, because everyone in the party wants to blame someone."

Still, the far more important development, Teixeira believes, is the fact that Bush is polling so poorly with moderate and independent voters. Conservative votes alone, he points out, can't elect a president. ''The conservative coalition wasn't ever much of a coalition," he says. In the past two presidential elections, ''they were just able to get enough voters in the center to go along with them to make it work."

The conservative coalition, analysts note, is far from monolithic. Republican politicians and activists who care most about cutting federal spending, for example, will be little moved by the Miers withdrawal. And immigration in particular, according to Adrian Wooldridge, coauthor of the book ''The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America," will remain a ''big looming battle" among conservatives, regardless of how the Supreme Court nomination plays out.

Nevertheless, Wittmann believes that, because the Supreme Court is so central an issue for most conservatives, dropping Miers will quiet most discontent for now. ''If he replaces Miers with a hard-core conservative," he predicts, ''the talk will be 'Harriet Who?' They'll forget it overnight, it will be instantaneous. This was a nice little lovers' squabble that was patched over with a nice replacement."

Last week, the reaction to the Miers withdrawal among conservative commentators seemed to bear this out. ''You know what the relief is this morning?" wrote the National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez on the magazine's blog a few hours after the Miers announcement. ''A return to the feeling that this president gets the big things right. There was a detour, but I'm confident we're going to have good news shortly on [the Supreme Court]....That's the confidence so many of us have always had in him."

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.