BOBO LOGIC
I don’t quite get the reasoning here, but drawn as I am to Bobo (David Brooks’s “bourgeois bohemian“) explanations for things, I think it’s worth considering.
The blogger from Oxblog (via Andrew Sullivan) seems to say that liberals are going to give Roberts a pass because he’s one of them:
JOHN ROBERTS, THE ANTI-BUSH? I don't know heads or tails about constitutional law, so I'll have to focus on the politics of John Roberts' nomination. And what I know so far is that 'liberal' journalists are falling all over themselves to see who can praise Roberts more.
Why? Because Roberts is the opposite of everything they hate about Bush. Consider this mash note from the NYT:
[Roberts] was always conservative, but not doctrinaire. He was raised and remains a practicing Roman Catholic who declines, friends say, to wear his faith on his sleeve...
John G. Roberts is an erudite, Harvard-trained, Republican corporate-lawyer-turned-judge, with a punctilious, pragmatic view of the law.
Mind you, that's a straight news article I'm quoting, not an editorial or even a "news analysis" column. Liberal activists must be fuming -- positive coverage from the NYT, WaPo, etc. is turning Roberts' confirmation into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Technically, the editorial boards at the Times and the Post are insisting that we must all reserve judgment until the Senate has conducted a thorough and substantive examination of Roberts' merit as a judge. But who're they kidding?
When the WaPo is running headlines such as "Democrats Say Nominee Will Be Hard to Defeat" , there is simply no way to portray Roberts as the sort of "extreme ideologue with an agenda of stripping away important rights" that the NYT says is unacceptable on the nation's highest court.
Now why has the media decided to give John Roberts the kid glove treatment? It's not because he went to Harvard College and Harvard Law. After all, Bush has degrees from Harvard and Yale. What matters a lot more is that Roberts graduated summa cum laude and was the managing editor of law review. He's not just an Ivy Leaguer -- he's the kind of Ivy Leaguer that journalists and pundits wish their children could be.
In other words, Roberts is supposedly the kind of Ivy Leaguer who thinks in a way that fellow Ivy Leaguers readily understand and heartily praise -- whereas Bush doesn't.
Consider how the NYT's Elisabeth Bumiller describes Bush's decision to nominate Roberts rather than Harvie Wilkinson:
"Well, I told him I ran three and a half miles a day," Judge Wilkinson recalled in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "And I said my doctor recommends a lot of cross-training, but I said I didn't want to do the elliptical and the bike and the treadmill." The president, Judge Wilkinson said, "took umbrage at that," and told his potential nominee that he should do the cross-training his doctor suggested.
"He thought I was well on my way to busting my knees," said Judge Wilkinson, 60. "He warned me of impending doom."
Judge Wilkinson's conversation with the president about exercise and other personal matters in an interview for a job on the highest court in the land was typical of how Mr. Bush went about picking his eventual nominee, Judge John G. Roberts, White House officials and Republicans said. Mr. Bush, they said, looked extensively into the backgrounds of the five finalists he interviewed, but in the end relied as much on chemistry and intuition as on policy and legal intellect.
I would say that the often-condescending Ms. Bumiller has thoroughly misunderestimated the president. While I'm sure that Bush asked Wilkinson about his exercise habits, we have every reason to believe that Bush carefully chose himself a candidate with both strong conservative beliefs and an incomparable ability to persuade Democratic senators to support his nomination.
In fact, it is precisely because Bumiller and others perpetuate such hackneyed stereotypes about Bush's intellect that John "summa cum laude and law review" Roberts has established himself so rapidly as an unborkable candidate.
The Bobo heart of this is “Roberts graduated summa cum laude and was the managing editor of law review. He's not just an Ivy Leaguer -- he's the kind of Ivy Leaguer that journalists and pundits wish their children could be. In other words, Roberts is supposedly the kind of Ivy Leaguer who thinks in a way that fellow Ivy Leaguers readily understand and heartily praise…” Because the media wrongly stereotypes Bush as stupid, it assumes his Supreme Court nominee will be stupid too. When the nominee is not stupid, but is in fact smart in just the way the media recognizes and admires, the media is so astonished and grateful (imagine what we could’ve had!) that it decides to make the best of it.
Something like that. As I say, the argument’s not entirely clear. What I find strangest about it is the claim that liberal media elites, winner-take-all people, feel an affinity with this winner -- summa, Harvard, and the rest.
They may feel such an affinity, but what I gather about Roberts suggests that beyond his strong analytical intellect he has little in common with liberal media elites, and is in fact significantly more alien to them than Bush. His lifelong Catholic piety, for instance, indicates a religious particularity, seriousness and steadfastness not at all like Bush’s bad-boy-born-again thing. His singular, late in life marriage and apparent lack of wild bachelor behavior before that makes him sound more like an Irishman, circa 1950, than a twenty-first century media guy.
Most alien of all, I’d say, is that intellect itself. Clearly, Roberts is a cerebral nerd. He doesn’t look like one, but he is. He loves thinking about and interpreting the law. Liberal media elites are not intellectuals; they are intelligent generalists who admire action, not meditation. Kerry, their last presidential candidate, had an Ivy League record just as mediocre as Bush’s, and they didn’t mind.
***************************************************
Update: The Washington Post also picks up on the 'fifties gestalt.
|