Sure, the president made Scooter Libby happy by trampling on the rule of law, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Bush has scored points with his far-right base.
The conventional wisdom insists that Bush had nothing to lose with yesterday’s commutation. Those who care about justice and democratic institutions are already repulsed by Bush’s presidency, so he can’t sink any lower. But for the dead-enders who are still inclined to back the president, Bush reportedly saved Libby from incarceration to win back their love.
“He’s playing to his base,” said Fred I. Greenstein, a political scientist at Princeton University. “He’s sort of retreating to his hard disk — his core beliefs.”
A CNN poll found that 72% opposed a presidential pardon, and 19% supported it. But many analysts say that Bush had little to lose and much to gain politically by siding with the minority view. Bush chose to commute Libby’s 30-month jail sentence, but did not pardon him.
“He won’t antagonize anyone who didn’t already hate him, and he will give solace and encouragement to the people who like him but are having doubts about his resolve,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster.
Among the encouraged was Eddie Mahe, a former Republican National Committee official, who said, “I shot my fist in the sky and said, “Yay!’ “
The dynamic is slightly more complicated than that, however. Bush tried to pull off some kind of Solomonic “middle” ground in which Libby is still guilty; he’s just not going to be punished for his felonies.
That obviously enrages the reality-based community, but as it turns out, it doesn’t exactly warm the hearts of the unhinged right, either.
Bob Novak reports today that other than Libby, “hardly anybody else is all that happy.”
Similarly, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page was in rare form today, calling the commutation “a profile in non-courage.”
President Bush’s commutation late yesterday afternoon of the prison sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby will at least spare his former aide from 2 1/2 years in prison. But by failing to issue a full pardon, Mr. Bush is evading responsibility for the role his Administration played in letting the Plame affair build into fiasco and, ultimately, this personal tragedy. […]
Mr. Bush’s commutation statement yesterday is another profile in non-courage. He describes the case for and against the Libby sentence with an antiseptic neutrality that would lead one to conclude that somehow the whole event was merely the result of Mr. Libby gone bad as a solo operator. […]
Mr. Libby deserved better from the President whose policies he tried to defend when others were running for cover. The consequences for the reputation of his Administration will also be long-lasting.
As spectacularly wrong as the WSJ is about the basics of the scandal, at least there’s an internal consistency to the editorial board’s argument — Libby’s innocent, the prosecution was wrong, he deserves not to be punished.
Bush’s argument, in contrast, is transparently silly — Libby’s guilty of multiple felonies, the prosecution was fine, but he should walk away from this ordeal without even a day behind bars.
Not even the most blindly loyal GOP hack can consider this coherent.