Via Kos, we learn that the Miers nomination was withdrawn after GOP senators privately told Andy Card that she wouldn’t be confirmed. For once, Bush must have listened.

Actually, that’s twice, and in two days. Yesterday he caved on Davis-Bacon after Andy Card talked to “a caucus of pro-labor Republicans.” Karl Rove, I assume, is huddled with his lawyers.

Most of us concluded the Miers withdrawal was timed to distract attention away from possible indictments of White House officials, but Dan Froomkin has another thought–the withdrawal was timed to be overshadowed by indictments of White House officials. He writes,

As Candy Crowley suggested on CNN, if there are indeed indictments tomorrow, the Miers withdrawal will be quickly forgotten. That wipes the slate clean, more or less, and gives President Bush an opportunity to pivot away from the leak scandal with a new Supreme Court nomination sometime in the next week or two.

CNN’s Jeff Greenfield also noted that the Miers withdrawal headlines in tomorrow’s papers will be a nice gift to Bush’s conservative base — on the very day indictments presumably come down and Bush really needs his most ardent supporters firmly in his court.

News media is brimming with speculation about what Bush will do next. Will he fight the indictments? Will the next nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor be a clone of Jabba the Hutt? Or will he move more cautiously if he doesn’t have Karl Rove whispering in his ear? Experience suggests the former, but the latter wouldn’t surprise me. At his core, Bush is a weenie. He can act boldly when he knows his gang of toughs are backing him up. But his inner circle is shrinking down to the his most obsequious courtiers–people who flatter Dear Leader’s ego but may not be much use in a fight.

Paul Begala writes at TPM Cafe:

When he came to Washington, Mr. Bush surrounded himself with tough-minded people who seemed not to be afraid to stand up to him. But now his team is loaded with weak-kneed toadies, and Mr. Bush is home alone. Karl Rove, of course, is fending off a potential indictment …

… What of the rest of Team Bush? Karen Hughes is at the State Department, as is Condi Rice. Al Gonzalez has decamped for Justice, and fellow Austinite Margaret Spellings is at the Department of Education. Harriet Miers is fighting a losing battle to avoid becoming a permanent punch line. Ari Fleischer is selling books and dispensing sage advice to corporations. And Mary Matalin is busy raising her girls and rallying the troops from the outside.

The exodus and incapacity were inevitable; replacing Bush’s stand-up guys and gals with suck-ups and sycophants was not.

Myriad pundits have pointed out recently that Ronald Reagan pretty much replaced the White House staff to get his second term back on track, as did Bill Clinton in his second term. And both presidents brought in solid people who were not necessarily long-time associates. But Bush went the opposite route; he drove the solid people away and wrapped himself in sycophany. Begala continues,

Mr. Bush would do well to augment his current staff, a C-Team if ever there was one, with some stronger characters. But to read the Bush-Miers correspondence is to gain a disturbing insight into Mr. Bush’s personality: he likes having his ass kissed. Ms. Miers’ cards and letters to the then-Governor of Texas belong in the Brown-Nosers Hall of Fame. You can be sure the younger and less experienced Bush White House aides are even more obsequious. The last thing this President wants is the first thing he needs: someone to slap his spoiled, pampered, trust-funded, plutocratic, never-worked-a-day-in-his-life cheek and make him face the reality of his foul-ups.

And so they wait. And they sniff the royal throne. They tell the Beloved Leader he’s the victim of a partisan plot (although how the Bush CIA, which referred the Plame case for prosecution, became ground zero of Democratic liberalism escapes me). They assure him all is well. But all is not well. People are looking over their shoulders. The smart ones have stopped taking notes in meetings. The very smart ones have stopped using email for all but the most pedestrian communications. And the smartest ones have already obtained outside counsel.

This White House might be saved if the old Repubican establishment would take the president into hand and give him some direction. But that is unlikely to happen, because the Bushies have pretty much destroyed the old Republican establishment. Sidney Blumenthal writes, “There is no one left to rescue the Republican Party from George W. Bush. He is home alone.”

Now the old establishment is faded. Its remnants largely consist of his father’s superannuated retinue. Not even the old Texas establishment in the person of James A. Baker III, Bush’s father’s field marshal and the former secretary of state (among his many official posts), who managed the Florida contest that gave the presidency to the son, is welcome in this White House.

The Republican Party after Bush, minus its traditional establishment, threatens to become the party of its irreducible base, the party of the old Confederacy and the sparsely populated Rocky Mountain states. But this base, however loyal and obsequious to Bush, regardless of any crisis, does not offer statesmen to step in to handle his shaken White House.

A sharp reversal of policy and turnover in personnel are the only actions that may enable Bush to salvage the shipwreck of his presidency, as they did for Reagan. But bringing in the elders, even if they could be summoned, would be psychologically devastating to Bush, a humiliating admission that his long history of recklessness and failure, from the Texas Air National Guard to Harken Energy, with rescue only through the intervention of his father and his father’s friends, has reached its culmination.

Other presidents, including the aforementioned Reagan and Clinton, have dug themselves out of second-term slumps. But they have done so by taking charge and making changes. Frankly, I don’t think Bush has it in him to do that. I think he is far more likely to retrench and wrap himself even tighter in his comfort blanket of sycophancy. If there are indictments (tomorrow?), it will be interesting to see if he is proactive and asks for resignations, or if he passively allows staff members to figure out their own next steps.

As for the next Supreme Court nominee–Bush’s probably wishing he could clone John Roberts. He may go with someone he thinks would be easily confirmed. Or, he may nominate some drooling paleo-hominid to play to his base, because they’re about the only friends he’s got left. We’ll see.