Matt Scully, a White House speechwriter in Bush’s first term, wrote a passionate defense of Harriet Miers in a New York Times op-ed today. Inadvertently, however, Scully may have raised yet another reason to worry about Miers’ Supreme Court nomination.
White House speechwriters first learned the name Harriet Miers in January 2001, when drafts started reappearing full of corrections, instructions and particularly annoying requests for factual substantiation. In the campaign, life had been simpler, the editing and fact-checking a little more casual. Now the old ways wouldn’t do anymore because “Harriet said” this or “Harriet said” that. […]
It is true that Harriet Miers, in everything she does, gives high attention to detail. And the trait came in handy with drafts of presidential speeches, in which she routinely exposed weak arguments, bogus statistics and claims inconsistent with previous remarks long forgotten by the rest of us. If one speech declared X “our most urgent domestic priority,” and another speech seven months earlier had said it was Y, it would be Harriet Miers alone who noted the contradiction.
First, I think it’s gracious of Scully to admit — as we’ve all long suspected — that the Bush gang cared very little about accuracy during the 2000 campaign. It was infuriating for many of us to see then-Gov. Bush repeat obviously ridiculous claims; now we know it’s because his staff believed in “casual” fact-checking.
As for Miers, I can appreciate a professional paying careful attention to detail, but if she was the one who was taking the lead in exposing “weak arguments, bogus statistics, and inconsistent claims” in presidential speeches, shouldn’t this necessarily disqualify her for nearly any job?