You know how you’ve looked forward to 2008, because it meant time was up for George W. Bush, he would not even be running, and no better how bad it is until then, it is sure to be better after the election?

Well, maybe not.

The Miami Herald is reporting that Bill Frist is testing the presidential campaign waters with the obligatory first trip to South Florida, home of Obscenely Rich and Rotten Republicans Who Like to Give.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist met with some of Miami’s most powerful and controversial figures Tuesday for lunch in a private room at Cafe Abracci, a move interpreted by some as testing the waters for a possible presidential run.

South Florida, with an unusual electorate that includes Cuban American Republicans, has played a critical role in deciding the last two presidential elections, and is one of the nation’s leading areas in the amount of money raised for national political campaigns.

While Frist did not comment on the visit, the people he met with interpreted it as an “exploratory” meeting with local power brokers in case he decides to run for president…

[…]

Harriet Miers is George Bush’s Miss Jane Hathaway. Miss Hathaway, archeologists will recall, was Mr. Drysdale’s prim, devoted secretary on the Beverly Hillbillies. When not bailing her boss out of jams, Miss Hathaway’s hobby was birdwatching, which in those unenlightened days was considered the solitary pastime of harmless eccentrics. But infused with the infectious stylized foolery of Nancy Culp, Miss Hathaway was more than a spinsterish stick figure; a subversive imp amid all those load-bearing hillbillies and lacquered Beverly Hills matrons, Miss Hathaway was sitcom’s first lesbian heroine. She wasn’t “out,” of course; like Rock Hudson’s penthouse seducers in the Doris Day comedies, her true sexuality was coded in gay irony. Those who were in on the joke embraced her then and now as a camp icon.

Unfortunately for President Bush, Mr. Drysdale is no one’s idea of a model executive and conservatives aren’t longing for a Supreme Court nominee who reminds the nation subliminally of that nice schoolmarm who never married. Conservatives are less entranced by playful psychosexual archetypes than you or I, and tend to abjure ambiguity when there are blunt objects available…

What I don’t understand is why Harriet Miers didn’t have the modesty and self-knowledge to say no to Bush’s overture. She must know that her training and experience have unprepared her for a seat on the highest court in the land; it is an honor she does not deserve, and a job for which she is overmatched. Yet she assented. Is it because so deep is her deference to Bush that she couldn’t imagine saying no to his proposal? Or is it because her evangelical faith have groomed her to believe that being on the Supreme Court manifests God’s mission for her, that it is the task for which she has been chosen, the reward for her conversion? Is she an instrument Bush’s will, God’s will, or both? Or does she have a mind and a will of her own? That’s what worries conservatives, a will and intelligence that may travel wayward against their interests. To them, all that eyeliner may signify David Souter in drag.

– James Wolcott

“Right now, my sense, in reporting this, Chris, is that the Bush family, political family, is at war with itself inside the White House. My sense is, it‘s—it‘s—it‘s—it‘s Andy Card, the chief of staff, and his people against Karl Rove, the brain.”

– Howard Fineman, speaking to Chris Matthews, on MSNBC’s “Hardball” yesterday.