The Washington Post reports on meetings between Administration representatives and conservatives:
A day after Bush publicly beseeched skeptical supporters to trust his judgment on Miers, a succession of prominent conservative leaders told his representatives that they did not.
[. . .]
The tenor of the two meetings suggested that Bush has yet to rally his own party behind Miers and underscores that he risks the biggest rupture with the Republican base of his presidency. While conservatives at times have assailed some Bush policy decisions, rarely have they been so openly distrustful of the president himself.
[. . .]
Bush tried to defuse the smoldering conservative revolt with a Rose Garden news conference Tuesday, and the White House followed up yesterday by dispatching Gillespie, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and presidential aide Tim Goeglein to meetings that regularly bring together the city's most influential fiscal, religious and business conservatives.
"The message of the meetings was the president consulted with 80 United States senators but didn't consult with the people who elected him," said Manuel A. Mda, a former nominations counsel for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) who attended both.
Weyrich, who hosted one of the two private meetings, said afterward that he had rarely seen the level of passion at one of his weekly sessions. "This kind of emotional thing will not happen" often, Weyrich said.
[. . .]
The main complaints cited at the Norquist and Weyrich sessions yesterday, according to several accounts, centered on Miers's lack of track record and the charge of cronyism. "It was very tough and people were very unhappy," said one person who attended. Another said much of the anger resulted from the fact that "everyone prepared to go to the mat" to support a strong, controversial nominee and Miers was a letdown. As a result, a third attendee observed, Gillespie and Mehlman came in for rough treatment: "They got pummeled. I've never seen anything like it."
[. . .]
Another conservative captured the mood, according to a witness, by scorning Miers. "She's the president's nominee," he said. "She's not ours."
The most troubling aspect of the Post's article is the assertion that Weyrich's fear the White House advisers still didn't get the message. It's bad enough that the administration assumed, wrongly, that conservatives would just fall in line like good soldiers. If the administration still doesn't comprehend the sense betrayal, then the administration is sadly truly out of touch.
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