The American Spectator

Saturday night hitting the booze again, talking to people still only talking about Miers and Plame.

Sunday morning, the buzz was about the “analysis” coming out of the newspapers and the talk shows, that being that President Bush had been wounded badly by all of this trouble, and that he needed to rebuild trust with the American people.

Many Republican and conservative consultants and White House advisers tell us that this just goes to show that once again, the MSM doesn’t get it: “The President only has to worry about, really about making his base happy. A happy base means that legislation is moving, businesses are making money, national defense is strong, courts are full of restraint and government is shrinking. All of those things make the base happy, and guess what? That makes a lot of other people happy, too. Not Democrats or liberals, but people who count on election day,” says a Republican pollster.

“Unless election day happened a year early, no one should care whether Barbara Boxer or Ted Kennedy or Nancy Pelosi are happy,” says another GOP consultant. “The formula is pretty simple, get a good nominee, get a good spending-cuts bill through Congress, and show you’re back on top of your game in Iraq and things like this bird flu scare. The first three things are good for the base, the last thing is good for the liberal media to play with, like a kitten with a ball of string.”