James Dobson on Harriet Miers

James Dobson of Focus on the Family became part of the Supreme Court nominee story because he came out in support of Miers and cited his conversations with White House advisor Karl Rove. Since it was a private conversation he was reluctant to share what was discussed.

Critics of the Bush White House began demanding to know what Dobson was told by Rove. Dobson decided to speak out after gaining permission from Rove to reveal some details of their conversation on Dobson's October 12, 2005 radio broadcast. A transcript can be found here.

Dobson explained that part of the confidentiality was that Rove told him about the nominee, aspects of the nominee's background and some aspects of the selection process prior to official public announcements. Dobson felt he should not comment specifically until those facts were made known by the White House and other official spokespersons of the White House. Excerpts:

....... my conversation with Deputy White House Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, that occurred on October 1st, just a few days ago. And that was the day before President Bush made his decision to nominate White House Counsel, Harriet Miers, to be the next Justice of the Supreme Court.
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Yeah, I haven’t been willing to (referring to Dobson's prior silence on what Rove said). The reason is because Karl Rove has now given me permission to go public with our conversation.
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But by Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, all this information began to come out and it was no longer sensitive. I didn’t have the right to be the one that revealed it and that’s what I was referring to.

Dobson then went onto describe what Rove told him.

Karl Rove had shared with me her judicial philosophy which was consistent with the promises that President Bush had made when he was campaigning. Now he told the voters last year that he would select people to be on the Court who would interpret the law rather than create it and judges who would not make social policy from the bench. Most of all, the President promised to appoint people who would uphold the Constitution and not use their powers to advance their own political agenda.
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Then he suggested that I might want to validate that opinion by talking to people in Texas who knew Miers personally and he gave me the names of some individuals that I could call.

However, the big revelation was that some of the favorites of the conservative movement took themselves off the list. Dobson said:

But we also talked about something else, and I think this is the first time this has been disclosed. Some of the other candidates who had been on that short list, and that many conservatives are now upset about were highly qualified individuals that had been passed over. Well, what Karl told me is that some of those individuals took themselves off that list and they would not allow their names to be considered, because the process has become so vicious and so vitriolic and so bitter, that they didn’t want to subject themselves or the members of their families to it.

Seems to me there is nothing out of the ordinary here. Will the media and the Senate keep pressing Dobson? I doubt it.