George Bush said one of the reasons he picked Harriet Miers for the supreme court was that he knew her so well. It says a lot about the president's current standing that the endorsement not only failed to save her: it may have helped sink her.

The withdrawal of a nominee before formal confirmation hearings have even begun is embarrassing enough. Dropping her after repeated personal endorsements, in the face of rancorous opposition from the president's own party, is an unprecedented humiliation.

"It's an extraordinarily unusual situation and it speaks to the fact that Bush is now a wounded president," said David O'Brien, a University of Virginia politics professor and author of a book on the supreme court.

The nomination was clearly a strategic error by an increasingly accident-prone White House. Mr Bush's choice of a loyal acolyte and his former personal lawyer with no track record as a judge reflected an assumption that conservative activists would fall into line behind his leadership.

However, in the absence of clear evidence that Ms Miers had done battle against abortion, or fought on other moral battlefields, the right mutinied. The appearance of cronyism (particularly after the publication of fawning letters to Mr Bush from the nominee) only served to inflame passions. Conservatives sent an unmistakable message that they would no longer be taken for granted.

Faced with multiple scandals tainting senior Republicans, and the serious prospect of indictments against at least one top aide today, the president realised he had to consolidate his base to avoid being reduced to a lame duck three years before he is due to leave office.

The formal letters exchanged yesterday between the president and Ms Miers depicted the Senate's demands for confidential documents from her work as White House counsel as the principal motive for her withdrawal.

"Protection of the prerogatives of the executive branch and continued pursuit of my confirmation are in tension," Ms Miers wrote. In his reply, Mr Bush agreed that handing over White House papers "would undermine a president's ability to receive candid counsel".

However, senators from both parties insisted they had not asked for privileged documents, and the White House attempt to explain the withdrawal in terms of a constitutional clash was widely derided as a face-saving exit strategy.

"It's nonsense. Clearly she turned out to be an embarrassment," said Stephen Hess, a former Republican speechwriter who is now a media and public affairs professor at George Washington University.

"It threatened his base, and although he could actually have withstood that, I think the legal community at the same time was against her."

Ms Miers had been making the rounds of senators on the judiciary committee over the past few days, but the meetings had not gone well. The senators, many of them former lawyers, were unimpressed with her grasp of constitutional issues, and her reported promises to "bone up" on subjects she was shaky on.

The release of embarrassingly admiring notes Ms Miers had sent Mr Bush in Texas, when he was governor and she ran the state lottery commission, added a note of farce. "You are the best governor ever," she wrote in a typical example. But it also raised constitutional questions over how independent she would be as a supreme court justice.

"Outside the president and his wife, there have been no strong supporters of this nomination," said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution.

However, it was outrage among Christian conservatives that did the most damage. Ms Miers was a candidate to fill the seat being vacated by Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate swing vote on the court. The overriding goal of many evangelical Christians is to fill that seat with a committed and influential conservative, who would help forge an anti-abortion majority.

On that score, Ms Miers' record was patchy. When she ran for local office in Dallas in 1989, she pledged to back an anti-abortion amendment to the constitution. However, a 1993 speech surfaced on Wednesday in which she supported "self-determination" in emotive issues - in other words, they were a matter of private conscience, not public law.

Two conservative pressure groups which had stood on the sidelines until then reacted furiously, adding to the angry chorus on the right.

On Wednesday evening, the resistance reached critical mass. Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, called the White House to say the votes necessary to confirm Ms Miers could not be guaranteed. The president spoke with the nominee at 8.30pm and by yesterday morning her withdrawal letter was on his desk.

Mr Bush is now back to square one, trying to find a candidate who will not alienate the right, while winning at least some grudging support from Democrats.

The contenders

Michael McConnell A conservative appeals court judge, he is antiabortion but a respected jurist.

Edith Jones
Anti-abortion and outspoken critic of the 'extreme libertarianism' of the current supreme court.

Emilio Garza
Would be supreme court's first Hispanic. Probably conservative enough to satisfy the right.

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