Posted on 10/06/2005 2:30:51 PM PDT by freedomdefender
In many ways, the biggest fault line emerging among conservatives is between East Coast elites, on the one hand, and rank-and-file conservatives elsewhere in the country. As soon as the [Miers] nomination was announced, Beltway conservatives began griping that Miers, a former Dallas lawyer and a graduate of Southern Methodist University Law School, lacked the credentials to serve on the Supreme Court. "An inspiring testament to the diversity of the president's cronies," quipped National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru. ...
Away from the Eastern seaboard, however, conservatives were warming to Miers. Irate National Review readers wrote to accuse the magazine of elitism. A conservative Texas lawyer complained that calling Miers's old firm "undistinguished" was "the kind of thing that only an absolute snob--someone who takes the position that no Texas firm could ever be anything but undistinguished--would say." Meanwhile, prominent evangelical leaders were busy singing Miers's praises. James Dobson, the president of the Colorado-based Focus on the Family, gushed that "Harriet Miers appears to be an outstanding nominee for the Supreme Court." Marvin Olasky, the compassionate conservatism guru, noted with satisfaction that Miers had been active in a conservative evangelical church for 25 years, with all that implies about hot-button social issues.
What explains the divide? ...what's important here isn't ideology but sociology --that conservative elites are frequently as credentialist, even snobbish, as the liberal elites they scorn. ...
To be fair, the conservatives who populate National Review's blog retreated from the credentialist critique of Miers once the angry e-mails began pouring in. They emphasized instead that Miers lacked a coherent conservative legal philosophy--that she'd "never written seriously on constitutional issues," as National Review's Jonah Goldberg wrote. But this is really just a politically correct form of the same argument. Pretty much the only places where students are encouraged to develop a coherent "legal philosophy" are the top 20 law schools. These philosophies then get refined in the kind of academic or professional writing that only a tiny fraction of lawyers ever do.
Hinterland conservatives had none of these reservations. An article on Focus on the Family's website talked up Miers's record at the "prestigious Dallas law firm of Locke Purnell Rain Harrell" and quoted the organization's legal analyst, who pronounced himself unconcerned by Miers's lack of judicial experience or fluency with constitutional issues. Contrary to the widely repeated axiom that conservatives wanted Bush to appoint a "strict constructionist," most rank-and-file conservatives don't really care about legal philosophies. They care about their political objectives, such as abortion and gay marriage. ...
So which side will win out? Allow me to answer with a brief digression. A few years ago, I interviewed a top adviser to New York Governor George Pataki. New York conservatives, particularly neoconservatives at think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, were up in arms over the governor's habit of buying off interest groups with generous state contracts. I asked the adviser whether he was worried. Without missing a beat, he told me that no New Yorker had ever rejected a candidate because the "neocons" didn't approve. And he was right: Pataki won an overwhelming majority of Republican votes that fall.
The same can probably be said of legal politics: No voter is ever going to walk into a voting booth wondering whether the president's Supreme Court nominees share her legal philosophy, for the simple reason that most voters don't have a legal philosophy themselves. That may be unsettling to conservative elites. But, then, George W. Bush has never been one to worry about elites of any kind.
It looks like, just like East Coast liberals, D.C. conservatives think they're better than people in the rest of the country. They went to better schools, so they're smarter and hipper, and they can tell the rest of us what to do. (Sad to learn that Ann Coulter buys into this kind of ignorant elitism.) True conservatism holds just the opposite view - D.C. ISN't the center of the universe, and intelligence can be found throughout the country - and in schools in many states and regions.
My husband changed his mind on the Meir's nomination when he heard George Will's condemnation of her. He calls Will "every liberal's favorite conservative" and decides that if snobby Will is against her, that's a point in her favor.
Yeppurs.
Why do morons think that can change people's minds by insulting them? This has to rank as one of the stupidest 'arguements' of all time.
I wouldn't be whining about that there's been plenty of name-calling on both sides.
Your statement is not accurate. People who have questioned her nomination ON THE BASIS OF SNOBBERY have been criticized. And rightly so. Snobbery is a form of self-imposed ignorance; it judges people by the school they attended or their family pedigree, not their personal accomplishments, skill or knowledge. I could accept the criticism that Miers' views aren't clear enough for her to be nominated, but that's not the core of the criticism that some of the D.C. pundits are offering. They're targeting her because she went to law school at SMU (the same university that the president's wife attended), as if an SMU graduate by definition can't be intelligent and accomplished. THAT's snobbery - the kind of ignorance that has been a motive force behind liberalism for decades, justifying the East Coast liberals in their delusion that they can and should tell the rest of us how to live our lives because they're brighter and went to better schools. When "conservative" pundits start buying into the same delusion, you bet they're gonna get flak, and they deserve it.
Methinks the so-called divide among we conservatives springs from the judicial goals we prioritize. An assumption that seems to be made too frequently is that all of us are all wound-up in the abortion and prayer in school battles. I, for one, am much more interested in whether the appointee would take world opinion into account when interpreting our Constitution. And if hate-crime legislation should be used to limit our right of free expression. Then, how about full enforcement of our immigration laws? Although these subjects are rarely brought to the forefront, I think a sizeable number of conservatives would like a little attention devoted to these questions.
Good point. Although you may not have meant it in this sense, Ann Coulter is definitely not going to change Bush's mind on Meirs by insulting Meir's law school, since SMU is the alma mater of Bush's wife. I look to John Kerry for an attitude that sneers at hinterland schools - - that's not supposed to be the outlook of conservatives. It's clearly not Bush's outlook. I was disappointed to learn that it's the outlook of a lot of our D.C. conservative pundits.
He has faith and will weather this too. How I wish he didnt' have to deal with this, but he's got the strength and faith.
I will continue to pray for him and our country.
I think it is interesting and important to note the relative proportion of membership in various religious groups on the Supreme Court. I think that would make Harriet Miers the only evangelical baptist on the court.
And that could be why some conservatives, consciencely or unconsciencely oppose her.
Criticism of Harriet Miers never had anything to do with elitism, that's a complete straw-man argument. "The New Republic" is obviously just trying to marginalize conservatives within the Republican party by branding us "elitist"
Sure, frame the debate in terms of elitism. Sort of "Racist Lite." So easy to spread on bread.
People who insist on merit, are labeled "elitist" by people who are short on it.
The pattern is unmistakable - no one is interested in answering our concerns, only in telling us how terrible we are for having them. This has been the prelude to the bait-and-switch in the past, what has now become the stock technique for the corporatists in the GOP to silence the conservatives.
I didn't frame it that way. The elitists did. Read Ann Coulter's latest column. Her beef with Miers is that Miers didn't go to "a top law school."
I went to the same university, Cornell, that Ann Coulter did (somewhat of an embarassment to me as I despise her.)
I've always been annoyed and irritated by Ivy League elitism myself (and it is a severe East Coast problem); I used to coach the speech & debate team there, and we've have new kids join the team, find out they were competing against Illinois State or Southwest Missouri State, contemptuously sneer, and then get their butts kicked (for a variety of weird reasons college speech and debate is dominated by Midwestern, often obscure, schools.)
I've run into a lot of brilliant people from no-name colleges, and I knew a lot of idiots at Cornell (some with PhDs.)
This whole "elitist" thing is one big straw man.
I feel it fundamentally misrepresents the major issue at hand.
People just want a candidate with a well documented strict constructionist history. There are dozens of such candidates. This was not one of them. When campaigning, Bush promised to nominate such a justice, so many of his supporters rightly feel disappointed, even wronged, by him not doing so.
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