Governors seek big-bang primary
The Republican governor of Utah and the Democratic governor of New Mexico announced plans last week to recruit other Rocky Mountain states to join a big-bang Western presidential primary Feb. 5, 2008. They want to counter the Iowa and New Hampshire duopoly and put Western issues in play early in the presidential race.
The move, as everyone noticed, would benefit Democratic presidential prospect Bill Richardson, New Mexico's governor. Less noticed was the boon to Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, if he decides to run.
Arizona holds a primary during the first week of February, and Romney strategists have long considered the state -- with its sizeable segment of Mormon voters -- as an early and crucial leg-up for the governor. (Romney has long been a leading figure in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.) Utah is not only a Mormon stronghold, it's also the state where Romney gained national recognition with his turnaround of the 2002 Olympics. The combination of states could pack a punch for Romney.
Richardson and Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah told reporters last week that they were confident they would get a ''critical mass" of three states to vote on Feb. 5: New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. ''But if we can add to that another two or three, that would be icing on the cake," Huntsman said.
GOP relations sour over nominee
The squabble among conservatives over President Bush's nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court is taking on the trappings of an ugly divorce. In the days immediately after the nomination, conservative opinion-makers remained on their best behavior; Bush and columnist George Will, who had just issued a blistering condemnation of the president's choice, were especially cordial during a White House celebration for William F. Buckley, according to a person in attendance. By last week, though, the spike in name-calling was infecting the social air. At a crowded reception for the Hudson Institute, a leading think tank that bills itself as ''future-oriented and guardedly optimistic," some of the guests were pointedly cranky.
Former judge Robert Bork -- whose name is now a verb, as in, to ''Bork," or sink, a judicial nomination -- could barely hide his disdain: ''I think she'll be confirmed and I think we'll all regret it." Neoconservative commentator Irving Kristol, whose son Bill is leading the anti-Miers charge, shrugged and smiled wryly. Miers was a big disappointment, he offered, but not worth going to war with the White House.
Into this sour lot stepped Andrew H. Card Jr., the longest running White House chief of staff in decades and a former Massachusetts legislator whose soothing nature once led a friend to describe him as a ''human Alka-Seltzer." Card's mission: Sell Miers to a room of several hundred mostly skeptical scholars.
Card did his earnest-best, advertising Bush's fellow Texan as a trained mathematician with a mountain of firsts on her resume. ''She was breaking through the glass ceiling before most people even knew the glass ceiling was there," he proclaimed.
Then, presumably because this was a scholarly audience, he offered a constitutional lesson. Card gave a rousing rendition of Article 2 of the Constitution, the paragraphs spelling out a president's powers. The president's constitutional role, he explained, is being challenged by ''others who are mentioned in the Constitution." (That would be members of Congress, Article 1, and judges, Article 3) ''Harriet Miers understands that Constitution, and she has helped guide the president," he vigorously asserted.
Eyes rolled, furtive glances were cast, but this being an audience of conservatives, the applause was excruciatingly polite.
Miers's foes accused of sexism
Miers's defenders have borrowed pages out of the liberal-feminist handbook they love to hate, accusing the nominee's conservative opponents of being sexist. In a TV interview last week, Laura Bush jumped in with her own assertion that Miers's gender was an issue.
The sexism charge has become so pervasive that we decided to hop across the political aisle and take the question to one of the places that made sexism a household word.
Kathy Rodgers, president of Legal Momentum, the renamed version of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, is no friend of President Bush, nor anyone who might be described as a friend of the president. But, she said, ''I do think [sexism] is an element" of the Miers's brouhaha.
Whether in law, business, construction, or on the Sunday morning talk shows, she said, ''there is this deep-rooted sense that women are inherently not qualified."
Noting Miers's ABA's leadership positions and presidency of a major law firm, Rodgers argued that a man with similar credentials would have received a gentler reception.
Maybe so, her conservative detractors respond, but would Bush have tapped a man with similar credentials for the Supreme Court?
