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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (111988)	5/26/2009 6:36:03 PM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541957

<<a sign of the confidence the president has in his political standing ... Obama and his senior aides had been getting serious pressure from the Latino community to make her the pick>> There is a contradiction here.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (111988)	5/26/2009 6:36:19 PM
From: Dale Baker	Respond to of 541957

First Thoughts on Sotomayor A few thoughts on the Sotomayor nomination: * Conservatives need to understand that Sotomayor’s reputation for intellectual lightness and a fiery temperament -- examined by Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic -- doesn’t really matter much. The only thing that counts in this regard is her performance before the cameras in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. If she is informed and forceful, her prior reputation is irrelevant. If she is halting and overwhelmed, the damage will be done in that moment. The Obama administration will have a good idea of Sotomayor’s skills in short order, as the practice sessions for her testimony begin. * The administration needs to understand that Ricci v. DeStefano is genuinely troubling. Normally when affirmative action goals are applied, people have little idea if they have been discriminated against or not. A few hundred law school rejections are put in the mail. A few may have been influenced by a desire for racial balance. But no one really knows. In the New Haven firefighters’ case, 20 people with identifiable names and faces were clearly denied benefits they had earned based on their race. I am not opposed to affirmative action in all cases. But the injustice here seems crude and obvious. And Sotomayor’s treatment of the case was also disturbing. Instead of engaging the important legal issues raised by the plaintiffs, Sotomayor’s panel dismissed the matter in a single, unimpressive paragraph. Another judge on the panel, Jose Cabranes (a Clinton appointee) was outraged. The opinion, he argued, “lacks a clear statement of either the claims raised by the plantiffs or the issues on appeal. Indeed, the opinion contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case.” This creates the impression of Sotomayor as an ideological judge, more interested in outcomes than in arguments. * But conservatives need to understand that having a good argument in a nomination debate does not guarantee your preferred outcome -- especially concerning one of the most sensitive, difficult matters in American politics. Opposition to affirmative action is one of those issues -- like support for the death penalty, or tough anti-immigration policies -- that poll well in isolation, but can alienate many Americans when argued with too much aggression. There is a principled case to be made against the Ricci decision. But will this argument be made with intellectual care and racial sensitivity on Capitol Hill, cable television and conservative talk radio? I’m skeptical. If done with the wrong tone and in the wrong spirit, an eight-week conservative campaign against affirmative action could solidify Democratic gains with minorities and confirm the worst Republican stereotypes. And that would be an additional Obama victory. By Michael Gerson \| May 26, 2009; 5:17 PM ET