Is the conservative movement cracking up, or just the Bush White House?
By Drake Bennett | October 30, 2005
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
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. <snip>
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/10/30/grand_old_crackup/
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