From Financial Times:
Top US Republicans are reaching out into to the world of high technology to tame the conservative backlash against Harriet Miers, Supreme Court nominee.
Within minutes of the nomination of Ms Miers last week, conservative blogs exploded with outrage, providing the first sign of serious conservative discontent over the choice of a woman with no track record on conservative issues, such as abortion, or experience of constitutional law.
Now the White House is trying to quell the revolt of the blogs: on Wednesday, Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, reached out to the bloggers who have been leading the charge against Ms Miers in a conference call whose content appeared almost instantaneously on the internet.
Professor Stephen Bainbridge, professor of corporate law at UCLA and a leading Miers opponent, "live-blogged" the conference call: that is, he took real-time notes and broadcast them on to the web on his popular "blawg", or law blog.
Mr Mehlman assured the bloggers who were contacted by telephone that though Republicans had been disappointed before by Supreme Court nominees who turned liberal on the bench, that would not happen with Ms Miers. "11:41: Miers will not be swayed by the ‘Georgetown cocktail set'," Prof Bainbridge blogged, noting the time at which Mr Mehlman made his promise that the nominee would not fall victim to the liberalising influence of elite opinion emanating from the bijou Washington DC neighbourhood of Georgetown.
Within minutes, bloggers posted their reaction to the call: most were unpersuaded. Several noted that Mr Mehlman stressed that Ms Miers would be a loyal ally of Mr Bush on the war on terror (which bloggers call the WOT). Mr Mehlman said Ms Miers might have to recuse herself from cases in which she was directly involved, but "because the WOT will continue for quite some time, there will be many opportunities in the long term for her to make an impact on those issues", according to the conservative blog, PoliPundit.
On Thursday the blogs were broadcasting yet more bad news for Ms Miers: several carried a link to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showing that only 29 per cent of people surveyed said she was qualified to serve. Nearly half said they did not know enough about her to judge. And one blog provided a link to some testimony by Ms Miers in which she says she refused to belong to the Federalist Society a libertarian lawyers' organisation popular among conservatives.
