Miers and Gore

Far be it from me to offer any advice to the right-wing crowd that's currently frothing over the not-what-they-wanted nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, but I'm getting a little tired of seeing stuff like this in the papers.

"This president is saying 'trust me,' and people don't want to just do that," said a conservative activist with ties to the White House. The activist was particularly upset about Miers' contributions to Democrats in the late 1980s.

"How do you explain this?" he said, referring to Miers' 1988 contributions to then-Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas, and then-Sen. Al Gore, D-Tenn. "She was in her 40s; it's not like she was in college and drunk at the time."

Listen to me closely, because I'm just going to say this once: Rick Perry, our beloved-by-the-conservative-base Governor, a man for whom anyone who is anyone in the Republican Party was doing their level best a few months ago to persuade Kay Bailey Hutchison to stay away from next year's gubernatorial primary, was the Texas state chairman of Al Gore's 1988 presidential bid. He was 38 years old at the time (how sober he may have been is a question I am unable to answer adequately). I'll freely admit we know a lot more about what Rick Perry stands for than we do about Ms. Miers, though there's a pretty simple way to resolve that particular conundrum. My point is just that Texas was a very different place in 1988 than it is today. If you don't understand that, you should probably yield to someone who does.

(For extra credit, buy yourself a copy of Fifty Years of the Texas Observer and read about what the liberal wing of the Texas Democratic Party thought of Lloyd Bentsen in 1970, when he successfully ousted progressive hero Ralph Yarborough in the primary.)

Posted by Charles Kuffner on October 09, 2005 to National news | TrackBack