Defining Sonia Sotomayor
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, May 27 2009
When John McCain made the surprise pick of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, the McCain camp dallied in getting a biography of the little-known Alaska governor up on to their official campaign website. In that absence, observers turned to Wikipedia and elsewhere on the web to make immediate sense of the choice. The Obama White House seems to be taking the opposite approach with the choice of Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court. Her official selection was coupled at the start with the White House's attempts to quickly define the nominee and her nomination.
The Obama White House, for example, is emailing out 14 different high resolution pictures of the judge (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), including shots of her as a young child at a birthday party, at her 8th grade graduation, with her nephews at Yankee Stadium, and in her judges robes. They've posted a photo of her mother, Celina Sotomayor, choking up at yesterday's announcement ceremony that will only not melt your heart if you don't have one. The White House website features a lengthy bio of what they're calling Sotomayor's "American story." Then there's the fact that the WhiteHouse.gov team blogged about an previously-made video from the Law School Admission Council on Sotomayor called "A Wonderful Life." It's an important point: the Obama White House's blogospheric savvy-- plucking third-party material from the web that makes their case and using their high-profile platform to promote it -- may stand them in good stead as Sotomayor's nomination process moves along.
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Conservative opponents have pledged to do battle on the web over Obama's judicial pick. The Judicial Confirmation Network's (JCN) chief counsel Wendy Long told the Washington Post, "We need to do this because the White House really has the bully pulpit...The American people, if we don't do things like this, are really only getting half the story.'' JCN has launched AboutSoniaSotomayor.com, featuring talking points against her nomination. The centerpiece of the site: a YouTube clip in which Sotomayor, attending a conference, makes the statement "court of appeals is where policy is made." She quickly noted that she probably shouldn't say such things "on tape." Expect the video to get major play.
The back-and-forth over Sotomayor's nomination has of course just begun. Google, for example, returns no text ads yet for a search on her name.
A potentially interesting note, though: ConfirmThem, the site launched by the conservative blog Red State around past battles over judicial nominations in the Senate, is featuring a post by one "Feddie" (as in, the Federalist Society) that doesn't exhibit much stomach for a fight over Sotomayor. "My take on the appointment?," he or she writes. "She's the best of the worst." That's relatively high praise.