The White House rolled out the red carpet yesterday to three judicial heavies from the Texas Supreme Court in the first major piece of its revised public strategy of defending Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. As a reward, these robed defenders would be excused for demanding more than a presidential handshake and a high-end goodie bag.

That might sound ungracious, but it reflects the strong and growing sense here that the nomination of Ms. Miers was a misstep that won’t end well for those behind it. With conservative opposition appearing more like a blood-thirsty mob each day, those who align themselves with this pick are in danger of ending up not only on the wrong side but of taking some painful personal hits too.

Amid this atmosphere, even traditional White House allies have been reluctant to voice support for Ms. Miers. An executive vice president of the Federalist Society who is on leave to promote President Bush’s nominees, Leonard Leo, told critics last week to direct their ire at Senate Republicans for backing down from a fight with Democrats over previous nominees. What he didn’t do was defend the wisdom of picking Ms. Miers.

But Mr. Leo’s deflection misses the point. If the backlash against Ms. Miers shows one thing clearly, it’s that conservatives in Washington are no longer the eager servants of Republican administrations. They may have felt somewhat out of their element in the years before and after the Reagan Revolution, but they have certainly learned to walk on their own since. They were ready for a fight.

It’s not just Fox News that made straight the way for conservatives to pummel Ms. Miers. The young transplants and recent college graduates that came here to fight for free market principles or to establish a conservative infrastructure on social issues 20 years ago are now part of the Washington establishment. They are not simply available to respond to liberals; they now set the terms of debate on domestic issues like the courts.

Mr. Bush has taken pains to distance himself from his East Coast roots in general and the Washington culture in which his family has moved for decades. But backlash by many of his own allies over his nomination of Ms. Miers demonstrates just how many potential defenders he had among the writers and thinkers and staffers who live here. He may be an outsider in New Haven or Cambridge, but he is not an outsider in Washington.

Indeed, the main concern that many of these Beltway critics have raised over the Miers pick is that Mr. Bush may not be as conservative as they hoped. That the White House did not appreciate or understand the concerns of these conservatives is reflected by its defensive reaction to the critics of Ms. Miers. The question is: Why didn’t the White House anticipate this response? Or, if it did, why did it choose to engage its own rather than the Democrats?

One cynical thought that has circulated within conservative circles inside the Beltway these past few days is that Mr. Bush has nominated two conservatives to the Supreme Court whom he does not expect to rock the boat on hot-button issues like abortion. The thinking behind this view is that Mr. Bush and his advisers don’t want Roe v. Wade overturned because its reversal would leave Republicans with one less issue to run on. It’s a chilling thought for people who pulled the lever for Mr. Bush with both arms on this issue alone – and the sign of a possibly greater backlash to come.

A less conspiratorial view is that a White House that was preoccupied with Hurricane Katrina and the War on Terror and hobbled by grand jury questioning of Mr. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, ignored signs of a rebellion over its pick to replace Justice O’Connor. Some conservative activists say that they issued clear and stern warnings about what would happen if Ms. Miers were chosen.

Perhaps Mr. Bush simply did not expect Ms. Miers to draw the kind of fire she did – that, despite majorities in both houses of Congress and a hold on the White House, he thinks that conservatives still have to whisper and tiptoe around the halls of power. The din they’ve mobilized in the past two weeks is evidence enough that for plenty of conservatives, the days of whispering and tiptoeing are over.

Mr. McGuire is a Washington correspondent of The New York Sun.bmcguire@nysun.com