A Climb Marked by Confidence and Canniness

A Climb Marked by Confidence and Canniness
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and LISA W. FODERARO
Published: May 10, 2010



WASHINGTON — She was a creature of Manhattan’s liberal, intellectual Upper West Side — a smart, witty girl who was bold enough at 13 to challenge her family’s rabbi over her bat mitzvah, cocky (or perhaps prescient) enough at 17 to pose for her high school yearbook in a judge’s robe with a gavel and a quotation from Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court justice, underneath.

She was the razor-sharp newspaper editor and history major at Princeton who examined American socialism, and the Supreme Court clerk for a legal giant, Thurgood Marshall, who nicknamed her “Shorty.” She was the reformed teenage smoker who confessed to the occasional cigar as she fought Big Tobacco for the Clinton administration, and the literature lover who reread Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” every year.

She was the opera-loving, poker-playing, glass-ceiling-shattering first woman to be dean of Harvard Law School, where she reached out to conservatives (she once held a dinner to honor Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) and healed bitter rifts on the faculty with gestures as simple as offering professors free lunch, just to get them talking.

Elena Kagan has been all of these things, charting a careful and, some might say, calculated path — never revealing too much of herself, never going too far out on a political limb — that has led her to the spot she occupies today: the first female solicitor general of the United States, who won confirmation with the support of some important Republicans, and now, at 50, President Obama’s nominee for the United States Supreme Court.

“Elena is open-minded, pragmatic and progressive,” said Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration who is close to both Ms. Kagan and the White House. “Each of those qualities will appeal to some, and not to others.

“Her open-mindedness may disappoint some who want a sure liberal vote on almost every issue. Her pragmatism may disappoint those who believe that mechanical logic can decide all cases. And her progressive personal values will not endear her to the hard right. But that is exactly the combination the president was seeking.”

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10kagan.html?hp

I posted this on another Kagan thread, but here it is again: mediamatters.com has an excellent front page spread on her.

babylonsister, I appreciate your posts very much! Sometimes I wonder if I'm on FR.

As for DU, this happens every time something new happens. It's not necessarily a bad thing, as we all get to read different POVs. Doesn't mean we have to agree with them, and people eventually settle down. The President has made his decision, and I don't think he's about to change it.

has posted it:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433x293150

Sorry, not sure how to post a link on here.

to become a Supreme Court Justice.

who want a sure liberal vote . . ." included the word "conservative" also in that sentence.

The fact that such an apparently biased source (as evidenced by the absent word "conservative") supports EK is grounds for me to remain very skeptical.