He’s pitching as hard as he can, but so far he’s not closing the deal.

Peter Baker and Dan Balz write in today’s Washington Post:

The conservative uprising against President Bush escalated yesterday as Republican activists angry over his nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court confronted the president’s envoys during a pair of tense closed-door meetings.

A day after Bush publicly beseeched skeptical supporters to trust his judgment on Miers, a succession of prominent conservative leaders told his representatives that they did not. Over the course of several hours of sometimes testy exchanges, the dissenters complained that Miers was an unknown quantity with a thin résumé and that her selection — Bush called her “the best person I could find” — was a betrayal of years of struggle to move the court to the right.

I just love the next paragraph:

At one point in the first of the two off-the-record sessions, according to several people in the room, White House adviser Ed Gillespie suggested that some of the unease about Miers “has a whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism.” Irate participants erupted and demanded that he take it back.

According to Dana Milbank at WaPo, Gillespie later told reporters that “people are getting excited about her confirmation.” Snort.

Maura Reynolds and Tom Hamburger of the Los Angeles Times write that yesterday conservative leaders put Gillespie through a wringer.

Many expressed feelings of anger and betrayal to Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and others sent to the gathering by the White House.

“Trust has been broken,” said one attendee who asked to not be named. The meeting participant told Gillespie that efforts to reassure conservatives “won’t work,” adding, “You can’t unbreak an egg.”

The crowd applauded as one speaker after another peppered Gillespie with questions regarding Miers’ past political contributions to Democrats, her votes as a member of the Dallas City Council and whether her nomination smacked of cronyism, according to meeting participants.

It seems particularly galling to the righties that a nominee can’t sail into the Court under a right-wing flag, never mind that no one has attempted the journey under a left-wing flag in my memory.

“With this nomination, we have ratified the strategy of the left and they have won,” said Richard Lessner, former executive director of the American Conservative Union. “With this pick, the White House has ratified what the left did to Bork.”

He was referring to Robert H. Bork, President Reagan’s conservative nominee for the court who was rejected by the Senate after liberals challenged his well-documented views. …

… Lessner said in an interview later that Bush should have picked from the long list of qualified “conservative heroes.”

He added that Miers’ nomination sent a message from Bush “that a jurist with established conservative credentials cannot be confirmed for the Supreme Court. He has capitulated to that view, and that’s why this is a major loss for the conservative movement.”

Translation: We want an activist judge who will “activate” our agenda. And we will hold our breath until we get one.

The males of the pack are snarling over who gets to be next alpha dog:

On Wednesday, skepticism about Miers’ nomination came from some GOP senators who normally are party loyalists.

“There are a lot more people — men, women and minorities — that are more qualified in my opinion by their experience than she is,” Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said in a television interview. “I don’t just automatically salute or take a deep bow anytime a nominee is sent [to the Senate]…. I have to find out who these people are, and right now, I’m not satisfied with what I know.”

Lott’s sentiments echoed those of a number of fellow conservative Republican senators, including John Thune of South Dakota, George Allen of Virginia and Sam Brownback of Kansas — all of whom are thought to harbor presidential aspirations.

Another signal the Bush Era is over–the Republican contenders are already starting to run against the Bush legacy.

Regarding Ms. Pig in a Poke, Thomas Oliphant presents one of her “legal opinions” in today’s Boston Globe. It seems Miers had a hand in the White House argument that it was perfectly legal to pay Armstrong Williams to promote No Child Left Behind.

Take Armstrong Williams — please. A friend from the left alerted me to this example of Bush administration antiethics, and it could be a representative indication of Miers’s devotion to her boss at the expense of independent, sound judgment.

When the conservative commentator’s receipt of money, via the Education Department for activities in support of its flawed and underfunded No Child Left Behind program, was exposed, the Bushies went into full damage control. From Bush himself down to department officials, shock and horror were expressed, as was a vow not to pay for praise anymore.

Much less noticed was the administration’s careful legal argument that although the activities of Williams and others on the take were politically dumb, they were not illegal — a judgment in which the White House counsel’s office was not a disinterested observer. Two Democratic senators — Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Edward Kennedy — asked Congress’s investigative agency, the Government Accountability Office, to probe further.

The GAO not only confirmed the six-figure payments to Williams via subcontract from a public relations firm, it also uncovered some previously undisclosed actions — notably the commissioning of a newspaper column from a press syndicate that was distributed nationally as if it had been independent opinion. And it also probed the use of public money at the Education Department to monitor and rate the coverage by individual outlets and commentators for fealty to the administration line.

For all its spin about stupid ideas, the administration took the odd position that the activity was perfectly legal. These opinions came not only from the Education Department itself but, more important, from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose ties to the White House counsel’s office are famously intimate.

Both entities opined that because what was being disseminated was information, there was no requirement that the government disclose that it was the source of the information.

This did not pass the GAO’s laugh test, and it termed all the expenditures improper precisely because the public was being fed government positions in the guise of actual journalism. The law that was violated is designed to avoid what this stuff really was — covert propaganda.

I hope somebody grills Miers about that in the hearings.