October 17, 2005--Bowling for President

As difficult as it has been, I have more or less managed to restrain myself from joining all the mean spirited commentary about Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Thinking it would be more responsible to wait until she has had a chance to present herself to the American public when she appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senators Biden and Schumer have had a go at her. (Though I must confess that I slipped a little and did some blogging about her after reading the NY Times story about her “Girls Nights Out” with Condi Rice and other female Washington power players. I do, however, feel a little guilt about that.)

My carefully nurtured restraint cracked after reading a piece about her in Sunday’s Times, an article in which Todd Purdum managed to penetrate the veil of anonymity that has surrounded her and perhaps, to the Administration, made her an attractive nominee (see link below). Purdum was able to get a number of White House staffers to go on record about her. For example, Joshua Bolten, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, whom Ms. Miers succeeded as Deputy Chief of Staff, said, “She’s a very gracious and funny person. I was racking my brain trying to think of something specific.” Then, recalling those relaxing days together at Camp David, he reported, “She’s a very good bowler. For someone her size, she actually gets a lot of action out of the pins.”

In Washington metaphorical terms, getting this kind of action is critical to success. For those of you who haven’t been bowling recently, getting action out of pins means that if your ball strikes a little off center, off target, by generating so much action, the pins you missed spin in a way that they in turn knock down others nearby. And thus your score goes up. So I got it—spinning effectively is the most highly sought after skill these days, and little Harriet has it down to a science.

Thus I was motivated to read deeper into the article, and was rewarded for my efforts. Ms. Miers’s first job at the White House was as Staff Secretary. In that role, she was the last person to see every scrap of paper headed for the President. According to David Leitch, a former White House Deputy Legal Counsel, “You might think anybody who was preparing something to go to the President would already have taken care to see that it was perfect. . . . But Harriet always scrubbed it one more time, and managed to come up with things that people hadn’t seen, from the broad wording to errors in punctuation.”

I now realize that it is because of Harriet Miers that everything within this White House has been so consistently perfect. It is comforting to know that during her tenure there that not only did she ferret out misplaced modifiers and split infinitives, but scrubbed all daily briefing memos so thoroughly that the warning about Al Qaeda’s pre 9/11 threats to the US, for example, made it into that infamous August 9th briefing paper that the President was then able to pour over so thoughtfully while chopping brush in Crawford. And also because of Harriet’s commitment to perfection, I feel better about the fact that she was able to vet the President’s 2003 State of the Union so carefully that he was able not to forget to include those most important 16 words about the Yellow Cakes of uranium that Saddam got “from Africa.”

So rack up the pins again fellas, we’ve got a lot of action and spin heading our way!