The chief evengelicals:  Dobson, Robertson, Lamb are supporting her.  The intellectuals like Will, Buchanan, and the National Review who oppose her.

General Rove would prefer to pretend to want to overturn Roe, but to permit his candidates to fuzz up, or dissemble, on the topic during the election cycles.

I tend to agree with you, Reed. I have long wondered why the newspeople don't make more vigorous attempts to pin down the president's views on overturning Roe.  One tried the other day and Scottie evaded the question by saying that Bush has no litmus tests for a nominee.  When the newsperson insisted that the question had nothing to do with the nominee but with the president's own view, Scottie kept calling it a litmus test and refused to answer.  They want to keep the president's views on this issue fuzzy.

The exchange is here in the White House press briefing from  Oct. 5, 2005.

It's not as if the Bush administration's now obvious disinterest in overturning Roe is unusual or surprising. To the contrary, Bush has consistently refused to expend any political capital on any of the major priorities of the evangelical right. His support of the DOMA was remarkably tepid; his faith-based initiatives seem to have been essentially for-show. Nor has Bush particularly gone to bat for Christians who face political opression abroad. It's clear that when it comes to the Republican coalition, Bush is willing to go to the mat for the anti-tax faction, take big risks for the neocons, hand out corporate pork like there's no tomorrow. But when it comes to evangelicals, he's happy to feint their way to get votes and then leave them cold when it's time to actually make policy.
What Democrats need to do now is make this clear. Democratic/progressive pundits need to hammer the fact that the GOP has played social conservatives for chumps, taken their votes and ignored their agenda. Social conservatives should be made to feel stupid and naive for supporting Bush in the first place. This will either cause evangelicals to stay home on election day in 2006 and 2008 or force the GOP to tack significantly rightwards, to counteract social conservative disillusion. Either scenario could result in an electoral trainwreck for the GOP. 

Although I agree with your premise, I disagree with your conclusion regarding the evangelicals.  I've read a few winger sites to gauge their reaction to Miers, and while there is some bitterness, the general sentiment seems to be "Give her a chance."  I think people are overestimating the degree of resistance to her, based in part on wishful thinking.  As soon as Dobson signed off on her, a large bloc of people were inclined to take a wait and listen approach.  

Basically, I don't see Miers as the catalyst for the kind of split that fractures the left, where many activists are essentially at war with their own party.  The Republicans, evangelicals included, have power to protect, and too much fighting among themselves will risk squandering that power.  I think her nomination was a blunder on Bush's part, but not nearly as big a one as people are making it out to be.  She'll be forgotten a few months after her confirmation (which I think is a good bet to happen), and as soon as the wingers can gin up another Terri Schiavo or some such to focus their energy on.  And of course, the 2006 elections are coming, which is another distraction.      

The loudest voices against Miers is not the Evangelicals but the likes of George Will, Charles Krautheimer and even Pat Buchannan.  What the Miers nomination may show are the fractures within Republicanism and within the Right.  The Repubicans are held together through devotion to Reagan and tax cuts, retaining power and as we have seen with Delay, money.

I think you're underestimating the power of the unity of the VRWC.  Without the Krauthammers and Wills developing the lines of argument, the interemediaries like Rush have no source for their content. Without clear talking points from both the administration, the congress and the punditocracy, the evangelicals are going to lose their coherence.

The metaphor Peter Daou has used is a triangle. The intellectuals are an important part of the triangle.  A mixed message undermines the entire enterprise.

BTW, I do think this is moot. I think Specter saying that he'd be willing to call Dobson and Rove as witnesses was a clear signal to the president that this one is not going through easily.  Somebody else, somewhere I can't remember pointed out that there is very little to be said in defense of this nomination.  You can't point to anything that makes her a person who'd want to pick.  Saying that picking a Supreme Court justice is the president's prerogative may work for a cabinet appointment, but it just doesn't fly when picking a Supreme Court justice.

What Senator will stand up and advocate confirmation for this nominee? What will he or she say?

Ed Kilgore has likened this business to a balloon payment on a mortgage. For two generations now, the Republicans have used one excuse after another for their inability to deliver on the evangelical agenda.  The last excuse--the Supreme Court--was supposed to be erased by Bush.

This looks like the Republicans are sending in the keys.

In my view, they've taken an unpopular set of policies as far as they can, hiding them under names like "The Healthy Forest Initiatiave". They've campaigned using code language on abortion to avoid having the majority vote them out on that issue.  They've talked up social issues, but been careful not to actually do anything about it. They invariably choose symbolic measures that cannot be implemented, or do not affect Americans. That this has failed to reduce the number of abortions here, and has caused unnecessary deaths overseas hasn't mattered, as long as they could point to those symbols.

They're out of excuses.  They can't wink on this nomination. They can't say "trust us."  And if they do manage to make it publicly clear that their nominee will do all she can to reverse Roe, they'll have to go public with a view that, in fact, they don't support and don't want to implement. 

The only way this nomination makes sense is if she's a for-real social conservative.

Or if she's a true loyalist.  This president values loyality to himself as the most highly valued trait of all.  Better still if she has no actually philosophy or ideology but will vote (like Scalia seemed willing to do in 2000) to protect the man and the party regarless of law or morality.

on this issue, the Dems are doomed again. Seems like Thomas Franks visit here was all for naught; some just wanna be culture warriors to the death...some of the cluelessness on this thread is astounding to me, especially after the last election...you cannot get what's going on in evangelism by reading a few scare stories put out on liberal blogs on the most radical of them. (And Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are old style! Billy Graham, now that's another story. Why do you think all the recent presidents call on him in their 'time of need," huh? What do you think he is? He's an evangelical!)

All that does is feed the culture wars like the right wing think tank maestros want you to do. That's what they want: us vs. them. And by pushing the generalizations, you just perpetuate the divide. You have to realized that in some polls in the past around 40% of Americans have identified themselves as born again or evangelical. And worldwide, it's growing. You can't even have a decent Dem foreign policy if you are not going to understand the appeal of evangelical christianity in all its forms. You keep hating based on generalizations, you'll simply marginalize yourself. There's a divide right now, the topic of this thread, and instead of taking advantage of it, you say "a pox on all your houses." I can see the Dems losing a big patch of Hispanics in 2008 if they took up your anti-evangelical rant.

PBS.Org-April, 2004

Poll: America's Evangelicals More and More Mainstream But Insecure

Diversity, Differences Mark Their Views on Society, Culture, Politics

....There are important differences among black, white and Hispanic evangelicals on political and moral questions....

Sept. 4, 2004 op-ed:

A Hidden Swing Vote: Evangelicals

by Michael Hout & Andrew M. Greeley

The idea that white evangelical voters are unshakably in the Bush camp is not born out by data:

....one-fifth of white Americans who belong to "fundamentalist" churches (like Southern Baptist, Assembly of God, Holiness, Pentecostal and Missouri Synod Lutheran) are remarkably pluralistic in their political and social attitudes. While it is true that white evangelicals tend to be more conservative socially, as well as religiously, than the average American, there is little correlation between religious conservatism and political conservatism. For example, in the social surveys, about 40 percent of Americans who believe in the literal, word-for-word interpretation of the Bible describe themselves as "politically conservative."

In the last two presidential elections, about 62 percent of white evangelicals voted Republican - or about 7.5 percent more than among other American Protestants. A majority, clearly, but nowhere near unanimity. And in terms of the electorate as a whole, it's hardly fair to say evangelicals are a dominant political force. If we measure their overall political influence as that 7.5 percent differential multiplied by their share of the electorate - they make up about 21 percent of voters- it comes to about 1.6 percentage points. Yes, as the 2000 election showed, even an edge that small can be decisive in a close race. But it hardly amounts to an overwhelming base. Moreover, those 1.6 percentage points are spread across all regions, not concentrated in the South, where the evangelicals supposedly contribute to the Republicans' red state advantage.

Clearly, claims that evangelicals have hijacked the nation's politics are greatly exaggerated. In fact, polling data show that President Bush's real base is not religious but economic, the group he jokingly referred to as "the haves and the have mores."

The General Social Survey found that 20 percent of American voters have family incomes of more than $75,000 a year, while twice that many earn $30,000 or less. The high-income group (about the same size as the evangelicals) votes Republican by an 18-point margin, while the low-income group favors Democrats by 24 percentage points. If the Republicans were to lose their 18-point advantage among the affluent, it would cost them about four percentage points nationwide in the election, more than twice the cost if they were to lose their edge among evangelicals.

And neither region nor religion can override the class divide:....

True Believers; More Religion, but Not the Old-Time Kind  

by Laurie Goodstein January 9, 2005

....The world's fastest growing religion is not any type of fundamentalism, but the Pentecostal wing of Christianity. While Christian fundamentalists are focused on doctrine and the inerrancy of Scripture, , what is most important for Pentecostals is what they call "spirit-filled" worship, including speaking in tongues and miracle healing.....

Chart: The Growth of Religions