Conservatives Feeling Betrayed

Rod Dreher writes a very tough piece in the Dallas News which expresses sentiments felt by many conservatives these days, and it's not good news for President Bush:

Where to start? With the LBJ-level spending? The signing of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, which candidate Bush had denounced as unconstitutional? The race-preferences sellout in the University of Michigan cases?

There was also the cynical use of the federal marriage amendment, which the administration dropped after turning out the social conservative vote in 2004. And grass-roots conservatives cite the president's intent to liberalize immigration policy with Mexico.

Then there is the Iraq quagmire, which, even if initially a worthy cause, has become a rolling disaster.

On top of this came the Katrina debacle, which further damaged conservatism's claim to competent governance.

Conservatives, consciously or not, looked the other way for far too long, mostly because we felt it important to back the president in wartime and because nothing was more important to the various tribes of Red State Nation than recapturing the Supreme Court. For the first time in a generation, a conservative Republican president and a Republican majority in the Senate made that dream a real possibility.

Whatever else Mr. Bush might fumble, we trusted him to get that right.

Instead, he gave us a crony pick of no extraordinary constitutional expertise or discernible vision, except for love of Our Lord and George W. Bush, and support for racial preferences. This is what we drank the Rovian Kool-Aid for? The Miers selection was no isolated incident, but the tipping point in a series of betrayals.

The highlighted section reminds me of something written by another pundit a few days ago (h/t me):

A lot of people seem surprised by the discord among conservatives and can't understand why the folks who have stood most solidly behind Bush are now quite upset with him. Do you want to know what I think? (Of course you do, or you wouldn't be reading this site.) I think conservatives have swallowed a lot of anger over various Administration policies which, at least in appearance, seemed to go against conservative values. Things like the education bill which was largely written by Teddy Kennedy, signing McCain-Feingold, the massive expansion of government entitlement programs like the Medicare prescription drug benefit, and the lack of response of the Administration to the problems of border security. In each case conservatives shook their heads a bit, and then resignedly said "at least we'll get decent judges". That was true until Miers.

With the possibility of indictments coming down on major White House players, the President needs to recapture his base, and at this time, the only way to do that is dump Miers (as nicely as possible) and nominate someone the base can rally around. Otherwise I fear the Bush administration may come to an effective end three years before it has to.


Harriet Miers; Miers; SCOTUS