Her performance in Munich - so vacuous and out of her depth she tried on her “total phony tries to condescend to a room full of 4th graders” voice - was a new sort of low even for her. I’m sure Biden’s SC pick will possess some intellectual ability, even if she is as much an activist as she is a jurist or scholar. But Sonia Sotomayor will be forever tainted by her intense identitarianism. I was actually a pretty strong Obama supporter at the time and her “wise Latina” comments, in particular, well before most of us were hearing about standpoint epistemology and enhanced, sometimes exclusive “knowledges” based on one’s identity alone, made a bad impression that’s never left. I don’t know if it’s true as reported that Scalia remarked to someone, re: the second vacancy during the Obama Administration, “I know you’re going to send us a liberal, but at least send us a smart one”. But whatever Sotomayor’s intellectual merits relative to those her peers or others recently shortlisted, her own obsession with her own identity and her supporters’ emphasis on it during her nomination is unfortunately a significant part of how she’s perceived, in a way Elena Kagan is not.
Her performance in Munich - so vacuous and out of her depth she tried on her “total phony tries to condescend to a room full of 4th graders” voice - was a new sort of low even for her. I’m sure Biden’s SC pick will possess some intellectual ability, even if she is as much an activist as she is a jurist or scholar. But Sonia Sotomayor will be forever tainted by her intense identitarianism. I was actually a pretty strong Obama supporter at the time and her “wise Latina” comments, in particular, well before most of us were hearing about standpoint epistemology and enhanced, sometimes exclusive “knowledges” based on one’s identity alone, made a bad impression that’s never left. I don’t know if it’s true as reported that Scalia remarked to someone, re: the second vacancy during the Obama Administration, “I know you’re going to send us a liberal, but at least send us a smart one”. But whatever Sotomayor’s intellectual merits relative to those her peers or others recently shortlisted, her own obsession with her own identity and her supporters’ emphasis on it during her nomination is unfortunately a significant part of how she’s perceived, in a way Elena Kagan is not.