A year into his second term, President Bush may be feeling the effects of political shell shock. Even putting aside the first four years of his presidency, Bush has had a dubious, if not distressful beginning to this, his final years in elected office.

The last month, particularly, has been brutal. Through no fault of his own, Bush has had to deal with the fickleness of nature--Hurricanes Katrina and Rita--and the harsh political damage that came with them.

Bush, along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, [FEMA] was widely blamed for what was sensationally reported as a near-criminal response to Hurricane Katrina. Subsequently, FEMA director Michael Brown was fired, and the agency did recover to do a much more credible job in regard to Hurricane Rita. But the damage was done.

Bush’s poll numbers were at his lowest than at any other time during his presidency. Blacks, as a group, felt that Bush was insensitive to their sufferings as a result of Hurricane Katrina, even believing that Bush ignored those sufferings because of race.

While Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were at the center of Bush’s troubles, there were many other consequential beltway distractions that have caused Bush some peripheral yet impacting damage.

Energy prices have been one of those peripheral issues that have dogged Bush for months now. While gas has recently come down a few cents per gallon, natural gas and heating oil will more than remind the consumer that energy prices in general have been, and will continue, to be high.

As relentlessly demagogic as the mainstream media has been in regard to how Bush “could allow” gasoline prices to soar, imagine what will be said in the dead of winter if the poor cannot afford to keep warm.

Then there are the never-ending legal problems of Tom DeLay, the Republican majority leader of the House. As of this writing, a second indictment has been handed down against DeLay--accusing him of money-laundering--to go along with the first indictment handed down by Ronnie Earle, the Texas district attorney that accuses DeLay of conspiracy. (www.breitbart.com/news/2005/10/03/D8D0SC8G0.html)

The recent release of New York Times reporter Judith Miller from jail reopens the wounds suffered by Bush in regard to special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s investigation into the possible illegal leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
(www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/politics/29cnd-court.html?hp)

Though the investigation centers on White House political guru Karl Rove, it is Bush who suffers the political fallout. But besides Bush and the ambitious agenda the administration had laid out for his second term, it is the GOP that also suffers from a presidential sophomore jinx of sorts--a term that has so far been filled with media-driven scandals and lost opportunities.

With all what ails the Republican Party lately, how should the GOP faithful look at Bush’s second pick for the Supreme Court, White House counsel Harriet Miers? If I had to choose a single word, that word would be “wrong.”

In Miers, a Bush loyalist since his days as Texas Governor, conservatives know even less than they did regarding Bush’s first pick, John Roberts, who is now the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

The talk of today is why Bush opted for a “stealth” candidate when so many “known” conservative jurist were available? The stock answer will be that to George W. Bush, there is nothing of “stealth” regarding Harriet Miers.

But to conservatives and Republicans, Supreme Court appointments is an issue that have kept the GOP faithful severely distrustful and reflexively morose regarding any candidate that does not have a de-facto conservative track record.

Bush’s pick of Miers may signal that the “bring’em on” Bush of the first term has gone, to be replaced by the more accommodating--or shell-shocked--Bush of today. But as many Bush supporters and Supreme Court watchers both will tell you, this is fundamentally damaging to future election prospects for the GOP, and crippling to restoring the courts as the arbiters of Constitutional law, and not the makers of law.

Many are openly critical of Bush’s pick of Harriet Miers, and make no secrete about it. Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, says that he is “disappointed, depressed, and demoralized.” Conservative/Libertarian Pat Buchanan says of Miers that her “qualifications for the Supreme Court are non-existent.”

Public Advocate President Eugene Delgaudio has said that Bush’s nomination of Miers is a betrayal of conservative, pro-family voters.”(www.drudgereport.com/flash2.htm)

Certainly, there are advocates of Miers, like the American Center for Law and Justice, and James Dobson’s organization, Focus on the Family.
(www.aclj.org/news/Read.aspx?ID=1911)

But for rank and file conservatives, the last thing wanted was, as Time magazine says, Bush going “with safety for his second Supreme Court nomination.”
Leave “safety” for the party out of power, as about all Democrats could do is minimal damage control against a truly determined majority party.
(www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1112960,00.html)

This pick by Bush may be more about the perils he faces within his own Party--namely Republican moderates who only last week dictated their terms to Bush regarding his nominee. (/www.gopusa.com/commentary/vfiore/2005/vf_09291.shtml)

Or it may be that all the bellyaching and hair-pulling over Harriet Miers is misplaced, as it is possible that she will turn out to be, as Bush promised, in the “mold of a Scalia or Thomas.”

But that’s just it, isn’t it? Conservatives won’t know with Miers, anymore than they really know with Chief Justice Roberts, or anymore than we thought we knew with justices O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter, and even John Paul Stevens.

But most of all, nominating an openly and unabashed conservative jurist was a fight that conservative advocates was willing--even eager--to have against any and all comers, most specifically the Democrats in the Senate. It is a fight that is long overdue.

With the pick of Harriet Miers, the White House has managed not only to annoy the Democrats, but the Republicans as well. No matter what, most Republicans expect Senate Democrats to flay alive any Bush nomination that comes before them, if only for liberal fundraising material.

But for conservatives, the nomination of Miers, more so than the Roberts nomination, represents all the nightmares and misgivings of the last 30 years of Supreme Court picks, and how anything other than a bedrock conservative jurist has turned out to be a social activist in black robes.

On this pick of Harriet Miers, Bush is wrong for not having that fight that conservatives have been waiting to have for decades, and wrong for not rewarding those who have trusted and supported him throughout his presidency.

Now, all conservatives can do is wait, and pray that Bush has that SCOTUS crystal ball that eluded Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush Sr. when they appointed their “paths of least resistance” candidates to the bench.

Vincent Fiore is a freelance political writer who lives in New York City. He receives e-mail at: Anwar004@aol.com