Much has been said about the President’s latest appointment to the US Supreme Court, and as Justin pointed out in an earlier post, derision among the conservative wing of the Republican Party has made the choice of White House Counsel Harriet Miers “the hot topic among (them)”. Although it it perhaps folly for me to do this, as I have several other projects clamoring for my attention, I nevertheless wish to gain at least some insight into Bush’s decision.

Because Miers is from Texas, and because she has served as the President’s attorney, allegations of old-fashioned Jacksonian cronyism abound. Yet, as the very phrase suggests, the impulse of presidents to “take care of their own” or to reward those close to them is hardly new, and in the most extreme case, failure to reward patronage has resulted in the President’s blood being shed.

Of course this is not to say that not picking Miers for the Supreme Court is in any way comparable to not picking Charles Guiteau, but the point stands that the cynical interpretation of presidential action as inherently factious does from time to time stand up to scrutiny.

Had the president been consistent in courting the conservative side of the Republican Party as he had in the 2004 campaign season, he might have chosen someone else. However, an earlier look at the President’s speeches appears to reveal an inconsistency in Bush’s attachment to conservative rhetoric that belies an effort to reconcile the administration both with conservative and libertarian elements within his own party, as well as to justify the stark contrast between his campaign and his second inaugural address.

Had the president continued along this same apparent track, he also might have chosen someone else. That or he perhaps should have introduced Miers differently last Monday. While a more complete analysis of Bush’s statements over the last three or four months will likely tell us more, Monday’s announcement suggests that Bush has taken a different direction yet again, at least with respect to Harriet Miers.

The president had been criticized by his opponents for the Roberts nomination, on the suspicion that Roberts was appointed on ideological grounds rather than his qualifications. Now the president is being criticized by his previous supporters on the grounds that there is no way to tell what Miers would do on the bench since she has zero experience as a judge.

One oft-repeated hope is that if confirmed, Miers will effectively fill the seat being left by retiring Justice O’Connor, that she will perform as an all-important “swing vote” in closely divided judicial decisions. If this be so, it would explain why Bush’s nomination announcement carried so many egalitarian indicators that he sounded like a liberal himself. That said, here are the preliminary results.

Bush’s nomination announcement was submitted to the LEO test using several test tables, and produced an average of slightly more than 35 “ideology”words for each test. Unfortunately that is a fairly low number, and so the announcement itself will have little bearing on the president’s overall ideological profile.

However, within the context of the Miers nomination, the distribution of those 35 words across L,E, and O is revealing. Of the 35 ideological indicators, an average of slightly more than 22 were predefined “equality” words–a characterstically “liberal” signature. In terms of percentage, that’s over 60%.

See below:

Still, this is only a short announcement, but the use of egalitarian terms in the announcement appear conscious, suggesting either that the Miers nomination was intended to address objections from Bush’s ideological opponents, or else that the nomination may present a direct challenge to his opponents.

Either way, the nomination really seems to have hacked off conservatives.