From todays NY Times, excerpted:

"..."They're not reaching out; they're in a bunker mentality," said one longtime Republican familiar with the thinking in the White House, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of offending the president. "The idea that they're going to blame the Senate process for her going down says to me there's no introspection going on."

Second-term presidents are notoriously insulated from second-guessing, and Mr. Bush has never been one to invite private criticism or confess public error. His high premium on staff loyalty may well have led him to misjudge how his nomination of Ms. Miers - by all accounts the ultimate loyalist - would play.

"In the end, I always thought the thing that would bring her down was that she was his lawyer," Mr. Smith, the historian, said. "That makes people uncomfortable. It's just too inside."

President Lyndon B. Johnson's nomination of his longtime confidant, Abe Fortas, to be chief justice collapsed in 1968 partly for the same reason.

Richard D. Friedman, an expert on Supreme Court history at the University of Michigan law school, said Ms. Miers's withdrawal reflected the reality that modern confirmations had become "so contentious that the president has an incentive to pick somebody whose ideology he believes is compatible with his, but about whom little is known," while the Senate "then feels duty-bound to find out what it can about the nominee's ideology."

He added: "The nominee and the administration put up a wall, but in this case, it crumbled," in part because of doubts in both parties about Ms. Miers's stature.

The conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan wrote in Human Events Online that, by withdrawing, Ms. Miers "may just have helped" Mr. Bush "save his presidency." On the same Web site, the right-wing columnist Ann Coulter allowed: "Bush has us back on the team, ready to cheer for him unreservedly."

But former Senator John B. Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat who is pressing for the nomination of his home-state candidate, Judge Edith Brown Clement of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, had a much different view of what Ms. Miers's withdrawal portends for Mr. Bush's power to influence his own party, much less the opposition, for the rest of his term.

"It means," Mr. Breaux said, "that the fear factor is gone."

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Less fear is always good, isn't it? That's what fighting terror is all about.

A