Left should have helped Miers win
Many are taking Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme
Court as a sign that President Bush has succumbed to the pressures
of his far-right wing base.
But what do you expect? Those on the left should have taken the
early backlash from the right-wing as a sign that it may be to
their advantage to help ease Harriet Miers through.
Yet many left-wing blogs and newspapers categorically treated
Miers as your standard to-be-hated conservative, and launched
campaigns of cronyism to mar her image. From the Daily Kos blog to
a Los Angeles Times story examining the art of kissing up to Mark
Fiore’s infamous cynical Web cartoons, Miers had few allies.
In the end, polls show that most of the dissenting opinion about
Miers still came from the left, not from the far right.
When you consider how long the far right has been drooling to
overturn Roe v. Wade, and how rarely the opportunity to put people
on the high court comes up, you realize that any candidate short of
being an Antonin Scalia mold would receive fierce backlash.
We may never know exactly where Miers stands in the upcoming
battle the left has before them concerning Alito. But I hope its
members will attempt to compromise and be more positive in the
future toward nominees.
Philip Lu Graduate student, sociology