The Two Knocks on Miers

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Now the anger and ironies wrap around each other. By picking someone he knew so well, Bush hoped to avoid making the kind of miscalculation his father had made with David Souter, yet now he stands accused of doing just that. And by avoiding a costly fight with the left, Bush gets one with the right. Conservatives find themselves struggling with whether they really want to whack their President when he's already down and go on the record opposing a devout Evangelical whom he trusts completely. Fight him and lose, and they prove how powerless they are to affect much of anything that counts; swallow hard and fall in line, and what good is their access anyway? By contrast, the Democrats--looking smug and convinced they have dodged a bullet with Miers' selection--actually had it easy. Senate minority leader Harry Reid boasted that he had recommended Miers in his chats with Bush, while most Dems just stayed quiet, letting the Republicans eat their young.

As for Miers herself, what did the critics know about her that made them so hostile--and what did they not know that made them so anxious? She is described as a private person who misses nothing. "A pit bull in size 6 shoes," Bush called her. Likes chocolate. Remembers birthdays. Works fiendishly hard. Engaged once but never married. Plays a mean game of tennis. Takes lots of notes. Makes coffee for the Sunday school. Gave money to Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign. Launched a women's-studies lecture series at her alma mater. In the absence of a paper trail, with almost no law-journal articles and relatively few case filings to scour, the fight came down to two main issues: competence and character. "Just shut up for a few minutes," advised Senator Lindsey Graham to the critics after he met with Miers on Capitol Hill. "Give the lady a chance, to find out who she is."

•THE EXPERIENCE ISSUE

There are 1,104,766 lawyers in the U.S., give or take, of whom nine at a time make it to the Supreme Court. Getting there is like being in exactly the right place in a field during a thunderstorm. "You can get yourself clumped together with the right crowd under a very small tree on a very big meadow," says a law professor who has followed friends through the process. "But then it's all about where the lightning strikes."

In Miers' case, being in the right place meant being a Texan who crossed paths with George W. Bush at a gala dinner in 1989 and eventually turned to follow him. A math major at Southern Methodist University (she was one year ahead of Laura Bush at S.M.U.), she dreamed of being a doctor but didn't think she was smart enough and didn't encounter enough people to tell her otherwise. Her turn toward the law had a very personal trigger: it was a lawyer who helped her family navigate the challenges of her father's shattering stroke. She saw the good that the law could do, and its power, and became one of nine women in a class of 143 to graduate from S.M.U. law school in 1970.