The decision yesterday by White House counsel Harriet Miers to withdraw her nomination to a place on the US Supreme Court is a substantial political setback for President Bush at a time when his administration is looking increasingly beleaguered.
Ironically, the nomination of his friend and former lawyer, once described by him as "a pit bull in size-six shoes", was almost certainly a response to plummeting support over the Iraq war and to the expected fall-out from the investigation into the leaking by a White House aide of the identity of a serving CIA agent. Mr Bush had clearly decided to avoid an all-out battle on the floor of Congress with the Democrats and liberal Republicans by eschewing an open judicial ideologue and activist bent on reversing Roe v Wade or other causes of the right.
Instead, he ended up alienating the hard right and evangelical wings of the party, to date his most unstinting supporters. They have waited loyally through Mr Bush's full first term with increasing impatience for vacancies on the Supreme Court in the clear expectation that he would reshape the divided court in their image, a once-in-a-generation chance that could not be missed. In John Roberts, Mr Bush's recent successful nominee for the chair of the court, they accepted, with some misgivings, a man who might be expected to continue in the conservative mould of his predecessor, William Rehnquist.
But in the replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor, a swing vote on many issues, the right needed a real radical in the Scalia/Thomas tradition to tip the court decisively. Instead they got a Bush crony with no judicial experience - though Rehnquist was never a judge before his appointment either - and one whose past gave few real clues to her judicial philosophy. The right has been burned before by such unknown quantities.
Ms Miers says that she is pulling out because of fears that the Senate confirmation process "presents a burden for the White House and our staff that is not in the best interest of the country". And she professes concern at the Senate's attempts to lift the veil on her advice to the president, although he would probably not have too much difficulty in asserting that such material was privileged.
Hogwash. The truth is that Mr Bush's key ally in the Senate, Bill Frist, told him on Wednesday that the votes for the nomination were simply not there. Ms Miers had to go. But her going leaves Mr Bush in a dilemma, caught between two increasingly irate and determined camps. Unable to depend on the liberals in his own party, distrusted by the fundamentalists, it is uphill all the way.