Elena Kagan & the Supremes (posted by DT)

President Obama has announced his nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy, and we get another demonstration of the idiocy that grips Washington and the beltway press.

The Supreme Court wars have gotten so contentious that presidents have discovered the best way to get their nominees through is to nominate "stealth candidates", lawyers with little paper trail to dissect. Because the other side is guaranteed to raise a loud cry about "judicial activism" or some such, no matter who the candidate is, the goal is to give them as little ammo as possible. So Kagan, who has never been a judge, never written a controversial legal article, and apparently never talked politics with any of her friends, is now the nominee... and the Right will start tearing apart every off-hand comment she made in a law school lecture to prove she's a radical.

Now that part is completely symmetrical; the Left tried to do the same with Roberts and Alito, who were so un-forthcoming in their hearings that it was impossible to know how they would act on the court. What's not symmetrical is the Obama administration's strategy: they've nominated a woman who is (as far as we can tell) a moderate. No fire-breathing liberal to balance out Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts.

So the Republicans seem to understand the game: since your opposition is going to paint your nominee as a wild-eyed radical no matter whom you nominate, you might as well nominate a wild-eyed radical! Thus we have a conservative block on the court that is as straight down the line on the right as you could possibly imagine. I'd like to see Democrats nominate a Larry Tribe or similar thinker- liberals are fighting anyway, why not fight for someone we can get excited about?

But of course there is one explanation for Obama's nomination of the moderate Elena Kagan: Obama just isn't that liberal. In spite of his portrayal, he campaigned as a moderate and he's acting like a moderate. And to this liberal the most frustrating part is that the common wisdom in the media is that the Democrats "need to move to the center", when that's where Obama has always been. I wish he'd started on the Left so he could really move there.