It's not worth digging up. This is a stupid word game that distracts from the problem at hand. The people saying "you can't find where he said that" are basically trying to advance the argument that "Bush didn't promise strict constructionists."
An that argument works directly against their "trust him" rationale for supporting Miers.
Stuck on Stupid.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/003657.html
Bush's past promises on Supreme Court nominees
Now that our president is openly talking about nominating to the Supreme Court his friend Alberto Gonzales, whom no one but no one considers to be a Scalia-like opponent of the "living Constitution," it's worth remembering what Mr. Bush has said about this subject in the past. This is from an Alan Keyes action alert:
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Gov. George W. Bush repeated a number of times that, if elected and if a Supreme Court slot opened up, he would nominate a judge that held the same judicial philosophy as Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.
On "Meet the Press" in 1999, the future President Bush said that the justices he most admired were Scalia and Thomas. Bush referred to Scalia during one of the nationally-televised debates as his favorite Supreme Court judge, and the kind he would nominate during his presidential tenure.
Moreover, it was in the first presidential campaign debate in 2000 that, in Bush's presence, it was said quite clearly that he intended to put justices on SCOTUS "who were in the mold" of a Scalia or a Thomas. Bush had every opportunity to deny it, or to modify it, but he let . . . it . . . ride.
That, my friends, is a powerful tacit admission that he fully agreed with the statement.
Bush rode the wave of conservative support to victory in TWO presidential elections because his conservative supporters were absolutely persuaded he would appoint justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas to the Supreme Court. Bush did not disabuse them of this notion. He darn well knew they expected it. Indeed he fed that expectation with his constant praise for Scalia and Thomas whenever the issue of SCOTUS vacancies came up.
Now Miers' supporters are saying, "But HE DIDN'T USE THOSE WORDS!"
What the Miers supporters are doing is stealing a page from Bill Clinton's word game playbook to argue that the irrefutable is not merely refutable, it never happened.
Do they really think the rest of us are that stupid?