Moderates And The Middle
by digby
Notice how Rick Sanchez of CNN frames the discussion about the Supreme Court pick:
For the sake of actual argument, the Republicans are really going to be on the sidelines on this one, unless things change. So you're gonna have people in the Democratic Party who are gonna be saying, no you've gotta have a hispanic, ya gotta have a woman, ya gotta have someone who either agrees with their view of abortion or gay rights or whatever it is and you're gonna have the other moderates in the Democratic Party who are gonna want to take the president back to the middle.
Evidently, "moderate Democrats" who want to take the president "back to the middle" believe that the next Supreme Court Justice should be an anti-choice, white male. Why they think that I do not know.
Now that the Republicans are out of it, the gasbags have to cast the so-called moderate Democrats in their role as social conservatives who are opposed to "quotas" and "special interests," like hispanics and women. (The fact that women make up half the population and there's only one on the court --- and that hispanics are the largest single ethnic minority in the country is what makes them so "special" I guess.) Luckily, those moderates are going to drag the president away from the crazed left wing DFHs back to the happy middle where Real Americans are.
Earlier, I heard Chip Reid say to Robert Gibbs that President Obama's remarks saying that the "quality of empathy of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes," was the very "definition of judicial activism."
These establishment journalists are stuck in the conservative mindset. (And, again, nobody has done a very good job of instructing them as to why this is wrong even though, in the case of judicial activism, you have to be a moron to see it quite this way.) They literally can't conceive of another way to think about this than the usual Democratic/Republican paradigm, even when it's no longer operative. Because of that they can't let go of the poorly reasoned propaganda and village conventional wisdom they've heard throughout their careers.
Update: I should have known. It's actually much more explicit even than that. The Hill reports this:
A group of more than 50 conservative groups held a conference call early Friday to begin plotting strategy, sources on the call said.
"You're already having chatter between conservatives on who is going to be the nominee, what type of nominee is going to be put forward by President Obama," said Brian Darling, the Heritage Foundation's Senate director and a former top Judiciary Committee staffer.
Groups like the American Center for Law & Justice, the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary and the Committee for Justice will all prepare background research on potential nominees, setting up the eventual, inevitable attacks on the nominee as a left-wing extremist.
[...]
"It seems like out of the gate [Obama] didn't seem terribly nervous about going pretty hard left," Daly said.
"This is a battle that is very important to the president. It's very important that the president nominates somebody who doesn't embarrass him," Darling said.
No wonder the gasbags are so well prepped.
Update: Goddamit this makes me mad. Pat Buchanan said that Obama should look for a John Roberts, "someone with real stature that impresses people, could even get Republican votes. I think he will go for a minority, a woman and or a hispanic ..." He then went on to admit that women and Hispanics did "represent a broad swathe of the Republic" which was very nice of him. Especially seeing as women actually represent a majority of the public. But he then reiterated that it would be a mistake. We need someone we can respect.
Matthews more or less agreed, wondering if Obama can "fight" the push to name a woman or a Hispanic. Clearly, he needs to.