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Walter Shapiro's Blog

Miers: What People Say Behind Her Back

George W. Bush is more concerned with heart than any cardiologist. As predictable as the weekly Tom DeLay indictment, there was Bush at his Tuesday press conference stressing his deep knowledge of the Heart of Harriet Miers. (Sounds like the name of an old-time radio soap opera).

Reflecting this hearty mood, the president threw in eight separate references to the "character" of his Supreme Court nominee from down the hall. (Maybe I'm a wimp, but a 10:30 press conference on a Jewish holiday was a little too early for me to contemplate drinking games built around Bush's word choices).

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By Walter Shapiro  |  Tue, October 4, 2005 5:45 PM  |  Permalink

Miers: Is She the Devil in the Blue Dress?

Business schools may design entire new courses around the Cheney-esque lesson of Harriet Miers' nomination: If you want a job, head the search committee.

Beyond this obvious moral, what are we to make of Miers? The relevant question is not whether she would be the most liberal jurist since William O. Douglas held down the left end of the Warren Court. Rather, the politically realistic standard is comparative: Do the signs and portents suggest that Miers would be a more moderate jurist than the person whom George W. Bush would pick if she were rejected?

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By Walter Shapiro  |  Mon, October 3, 2005 5:45 PM  |  Permalink

Primary Calendar Choler

Sick puppy that I am, I was thrilled to discover that a high-minded presidential commission, led by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, cares about the schedule of presidential primaries for 2008. Just reading that prior sentence may tell you more than you need to know about my passions which, if this were the 19th century, might well have included Esperanto as a universal language.

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By Walter Shapiro  |  Mon, September 19, 2005 11:31 PM  |  Permalink

Who Sent Hadley?

Add the Stephen Hadley snafu to the long annals of failed Bush diplomatic initiatives. Last Saturday national security advisor Hadley and deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin left the presidential bubble in Crawford to hold a surprise 45-minute roadside meeting with Cindy Sheehan. Did the two senior White House officials believe that their radiant presence alone could disarm Sheehan? Did Hadley and Hagin really think they could make Sheehan go away simply by expressing their condolences and smiling politely during her tirade against the war that killed her son? If so, the president's men once again badly misjudged the determination of their adversary.

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By Walter Shapiro  |  Fri, August 12, 2005 3:07 PM  |  Permalink

Flying Saucers and Valerie Plame

When social psychologist Leon Festinger developed his landmark theory of "cognitive dissonance" in the 1950s, he had to hang out for months with a UFO cult awaiting the end of the world to find real-life examples. Festinger’s When Prophesy Fails recounts the mental contortions that these the-end-is-nigh true believers go through to square their faith in their imminent rescue by flying saucers with the inconvenient reality that nothing other-worldly was then happening in America -- unless, of course, you count Liberace's career.

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By Walter Shapiro  |  Mon, July 18, 2005 11:22 AM  |  Permalink

The Matt and Judy Law

Joining the political fad to name legislation after the first names of innocent victims, I want to propose the “Matt and Judy Law.” No, this is not a federal shield law, though that too would be a worthy tribute to the courage of Judy Miller and Matt Cooper. What I am suggesting instead is a bit more modest, though far more likely in this press-hating era to sail through Congress than a federal law enhancing the legal protections available to reporters confronted by mad-dog prosecutors.

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By Walter Shapiro  |  Wed, July 6, 2005 11:32 AM  |  Permalink

Jail-House Door Blues

Wednesday afternoon a federal judge told Matt Cooper of Time and Judy Miller of the New York Times that he would send them to jail in a week for contempt. Unless their attorneys miraculously succeed with desperation legal arguments, these two brave reporters will be punished for the age-old offense of refusing to name names. In this case, the purported misdeed is resisting the demands of a modern-day Inspector Javert to reveal the identities of their confidential government sources.

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By Walter Shapiro  |  Wed, June 29, 2005 3:25 PM  |  Permalink

Rhetorical Verdict: A C-Minus Speech

With Americans in turmoil over the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson framed his 1968 State of the Union Address around this rhetorical question, "Why, then, this restlessness?" Three months later, that same restlessness forced LBJ to abandon his dreams of another term in the White House.

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By Walter Shapiro  |  Tue, June 28, 2005 9:01 PM  |  Permalink

Peaceniks for Bolton

This is another week when an overwrought Senate will loudly dither over the endless saga of John Bolton's nomination to the UN ambassadorship once graced by the likes of Adlai Stevenson and Pat Moynihan. Judging from the signs and portents (okay, I've been reading newspapers not entrails), Senate Republicans on Monday will again fail to break the Democratic filibuster. Anticipating this legislative setback, a plaintive Condi Rice said Sunday on ABC, "We need to get an up-or-down vote on John Bolton...That's all that we're asking."

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By Walter Shapiro  |  Sun, June 19, 2005 2:54 PM  |  Permalink

Driving Bush Bats

Soros recently added a new nettle to his nettlesome reputation by emerging as a major financial backer of a consortium out to buy the front-running, nine-game-winning-streak Washington Nationals, an orphan team owned by the other 29 major-league franchises. The dramatic return of baseball to the nation's capital (34 years after the hapless Senators relocated to, yes, Texas) is fast creating a new slogan: "Washington -- last in post-war occupations, last in peace, but miraculously first in the National League East." Now as a free-market Republican, George W. Bush, of course, believes in the inalienable right of any billionaire, freed from the burden of taxes, to buy any plaything he might desire. That is, unless the thing of beauty is a baseball franchise, located just a few miles from where the president presides over the only Secret-Service-secured Tee-Ball league in the world.

With the polls turning south on Iran and the economy, Bush probably wakes up many mornings longing for the happy days as a baseball owner when he was a front man running the Texas Rangers from 1989-94. In fact, against the troglodyte backdrop of baseball, Bush was an enlightened front-office executive, bravely voting against the ouster of Fay Vincent as the last legitimate commissioner and opposing such tradition-tromping abominations as inter-league play. But Bush also surely assumed that whoever bought the Washington Nationals would fit into the politically conservative clubbable atmosphere of big-league baseball where only a handful of teams (notably, the Baltimore Orioles and the Boston Red Sox) have Democratic leanings. An Associated Press survey last October found that owners of more than half the big-league teams contributed to the president's reelection campaign.

That's why Soros is causing Bush so much tsuris. Even though he is a late entry to buttress the long-shot effort by Washington entrepreneur Jonathan Ledecky, Soros has the deep pockets to prevail in a Babe Ruthian bidding war. This was the point of a shrewd and little-noticed article in the conservative Washington Times which theorized that "Mr. Soros' status as the 24th-richest man in America makes it impossible to discount him as a factor in the Nationals race."

The odds still favor a rival group headed by former Nixon aide Fred Malek, which has enlisted Colin Powell as its glad-handing public face. But the only thing that counts more than social and ideological compatibility in tapping an ownership group for the ballyard equivalent of Skull and Bones is cash on the barrel head. Which is why it would be so much fun on opening day 2006 to see our baseball-loving president sitting in the owners box of the Washington Nationals, right next to his arch-nemesis George Soros.

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By Walter Shapiro  |  Sun, June 12, 2005 2:25 PM  |  Permalink

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