So President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court last week, and our friends on the right said exactly what we expected them to say:
She's an "activist judge."
Sen. Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Americans United for Life were among those who levied the charge. And what you have to understand is that this was inevitable. Regardless of whom Obama nominated to fill retiring Justice David Souter's seat, conservatives were going to call the candidate an "activist judge." It's just how they roll.
SMART REMARKS: Sonia's critics play race card What
did take me aback, right out of the gate, was the right's attempt to paint Sotomayor's Latino heritage as a liability.
For the most part, this didn't come from elected Republican officials, but the FOXNews/AM radio chorus. Indeed, the nomination wasn't 24 hours old before the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and other angry white conservatives were telling us that Sotomayor is racist.
This, on the basis of a speech she gave eight years ago, in which she said, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn't lived that life."
And the white Furies shrieked that any Caucasian judge who suggested he might reach a better conclusion based on his whiteness would be ripped as racist.
But if you read the line in the context of her entire speech, which right-wing pundits are careful not to do, it's clear that her message is that ALL judges are affected by their life experiences. The goal is to transcend that, even though it may be difficult.
Here's a woman who grew up in the projects, the daughter of a single mom, who has obviously lived a vastly different life than the average suburban Limbaugh listener. And that background may indeed help her to make more informed decisions,
wiser decisions, though she herself said that this should never be the overriding factor.
But this part of the story involves nuance and thought, never in abundance on FOX News. Instead, we get yet another heaping helping of angry white male outrage (I'm nominating Ann Coulter for an honorary Y-chromosome). And the result is this cartoonish depiction of a nominee who went to Princeton and Yale Law and sat on the Circuit Court bench, but whose career can now be reduced to two words: identity politics.
In other words, it doesn't matter how intelligent or accomplished Sonia Sotomayor might be — because she's a Latina.
And this itself is a perfect example of identity politics — white identity politics.
It's obnoxious and it's offensive, but just as the hard-core right was going to label any Obama pick as an "activist judge" — so too were they destined to characterize any Latino nominee as what Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall termed "a scary Mexican, understood in the sense of 'Mexican' as anybody with a Spanish last name who isn't actively working to keep the Cuban embargo in place."
And "to the extent that there's political calculation at work," wrote Marshall, "it seems more likely that it's the realization that any Latina nominee would bring out the right-wing crazies like moths to a flame."
This, too, is how they roll.
And after all these years — why in the world was I surprised?
Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817. 
