ABCDE
OUTLOOK
sunday, may 16, 2010
INSIDE
Caitlin, Kaitlyn or Kate?
The baby-naming race. B4
How to sue Big Oil
Lessons from the Exxon spill. B5
BOOK WORLD, B6-8
Talk to the finger An art historian appreciates the beauty of this most communicative appendage. B6 But I’d have to kill you When do journalists cross the line in revealing government secrets? B7 Wise guy, nice guy A new biography of Al Capone seeks to humanize the notorious gangster. B8
5
Who belongs on the bench?
PrincetonPrinceton
Harvard
YALE
KRISTIN LENZ
The Worst Week in Washington: Chris Cillizza picks on ousted West Virginia Democrat Alan Mollohan. B2
B
DC MD VA B
myths about reaching the high court. B3
The elite, no apology needed
J
by Christopher Edley Jr.
udges should be able to understand and empathize with just about anyone, be- cause the law is about everyone. With that in mind, is what’s good for Harvard and Yale good for America? If Elena Kagan is confirmed, we will have an entire Supreme Court educated at Har- vard and Yale law schools, demonstrating again the grip that academic elites have on the levers of power. Some worry this homoge- neity is too anti-democratic, even for our most anti-democratic of institutions. I don’t hear a claim that even knuckleheads deserve a spot on the court, but surely some brilliant possibilities attended, say, Berkeley? Or Tu- lane? In confirmation battles, populist cred is at war with elitist credentials. Our political cul-
elites continued on B2
Christopher Edley Jr. is dean of the School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley.
The case for more mothers
ture values a common touch, but our legal culture values uncommon smarts. Supreme Court nominations are a shotgun marriage of the two, but it should not be a marriage of equals. For a court nominee or a political candi-
date, there are communications strategies to finesse a blinding résumé. If you want to ex- plain to the public why you support a nerdy nominee (embrace it, Elena), you may want to talk about her Average Jane swellness. A senator walks out with the newest pick and grins into the cameras saying: “This is a fine person. Very likable. Loves fishing.” Transla- tion: “Pretty darned smart, but she seems hu- man (enough), so don’t hate me if I decide to support her.”
by Ann Gerhart
Y
BOOK REVIEW
A gifted orator who can’t make his point
THE PROMISE President Obama, Year One
By Jonathan Alter
Simon & Schuster. 458 pp. $28
by Matthew Dallek
J
onathan Alter has delivered an ex- ceptionally well-written account of President Obama’s first year in of- fice. Brimming with fresh and judi- cious ideas, his book fuses political analysis, subtle insights into the presi- dent’s mind and policy debates into a fast-paced, crisis-filled story. “The Prom- ise,” based on more than 200 interviews with Obama and his close friends and aides, provides an uncommonly candid look inside a somewhat walled-off White House.
While it praises the president as a commanding leader, “The Promise” isn’t a paean to Obama or a blinkered brief on behalf of his administration. It pen- etrates beyond the superficial arguments on the cable news shout-fests and goes deeper than the media’s high-beam focus on Washington personalities. It under-
scores how much political and pol- icy contradictions have defined the president’s early tenure. Obama’s Year One agenda was
aggressively focused on tackling both long-term problems and the urgent conditions confronting the country. The president’s most inspi- rational ideas from the 2008 cam- paign — transcending the red-blue divide and restoring Americans’ faith in their political leaders — smacked into crises, domestic and foreign. Credit was still frozen when he entered office; the nation was shedding jobs at a fright- ening pace. “The first task was triage,” Alter writes. Obama attempted to stop the hemor-
rhaging. Yet he simultaneously pursued his broader, and politically risky, struc- tural reform agenda. It is this economic, international and political context that must be understood to grasp the magni- tude of Obama’s presidency and properly assess his time in office so far, Alter sug- gests. The economic stimulus, bank and auto bailouts, and other policies, though deep-
obama continued on B4
Matthew Dallek, a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center, is the author of “The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics.”
BILL O’LEARY THE WASHINGTON POST
es, we know the Supreme Court is stacked with Catholics, Jews, Ivy Leaguers, New Yorkers, judicial monks and opera fans. And no, the cohort of nine justices doesn’t much resemble the whole of America. So President Obama set out to at least add one more wom- an to the mix. His nomination last week of Elena Kagan to the court, Obama declared, would make the body “more inclusive, more representative, more reflective of us as a people than ever be- fore.” The grumblings came quickly: He should
have chosen a black woman, some said, or an Asian American, or someone with a law de- gree from a public university. But in selecting Kagan, Obama ensured that one key demo-
graphic would actually lose representation on the court, compared with its membership just a few years ago: mothers, a category in which 80 percent of American women eventually land. It’s not like we’ve never had moms in black
robes. The flinty rancher and the feminist fire- brand who blazed the trail for female justices both are mothers, with five children between them. Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who joined the bench in 1981 and 1993, respectively, benefited from high- achieving husbands who held the Bible for them as they were sworn in, supported their aspirations and sacrificed for their careers. O’Connor, now 80, and Ginsburg, now 77, never talked much about balance in their own
mothers continued on B2
Ann Gerhart is a reporter and editor on the national staff of The Washington Post.
Britain does it fast. So why can’t we?
by Al Kamen
ernment, here’s how the transition itself took place: On Tuesday, Prime Minister Gordon
B
Brown stepped out of 10 Downing Street, went to Buckingham Palace and told Queen Elizabeth he was resigning. Minutes later, Conservative leader Da- vid Cameron visited Her Majesty, ac- cepted the position of prime minister and then walked into 10 Downing. Done. The larger government transition — which over there means moving in a score of cabinet secretaries from Parlia- ment to run the major departments and selecting about 80 junior ministers — was essentially completed by Friday. The powerful career civil service stays pretty much in place. The process is “brutally quick and quite unsentimen- tal,” as one British observer remarked to me. Here in the World’s Greatest Democ- racy, meanwhile, the Obama adminis-
ritain’s May 6 elections swept the Conservatives into power for the first time in 13 years. After a few days of negotia- tions to form a coalition gov-
tration’s transition, which began 16 months ago, drags on. In fact, in terms of moving new people into the top jobs, it will never end. That’s because by the time the administration finally fills all of the most important positions, maybe sometime next year, many of the first appointees will be rotating out. (The average time in those jobs is 21
⁄2 years.)
Why are we so slow compared with our stodgy cousins across the pond? You can blame the founding fathers and their troublesome “advice and consent” clause, which requires that the Senate approve presidential appointees to Cab- inet departments and executive agen- cies. President Ronald Reagan, in his first
year, filled 255 of the 295 top positions in the departments and agencies. The next few presidents filled them at a comparable pace. No president did bet- ter until President Obama last year filled 272 such positions. The problem, however, is that as gov- ernment has grown over the years, so has the number of positions needing Senate confirmation — from 295 in the Reagan administration to 422 in the Obama administration, according to a
transition continued on B5
Al Kamen, The Washington Post’s “In the Loop” columnist, covered the transitions of government for the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations.
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