Ordinary Woman: Sonia Sotomayor and the Fight Over ‘Empathy’

By: Calvin Woodward

WASHINGTON (AP) — A black president introduced his Hispanic Supreme Court nominee while his white vice president watched. It was a custom-made American tableau, the politics of biography.

The flags in the East Room around Barack Obama, Sonia Sotomayor and Joe Biden on Tuesday were almost superfluous. Everything else spoke of red, white and blue as the curtain rose on the president's first Supreme Court nomination.

The scrutiny is just beginning of Sotomayor's thick record as a federal appeals judge, trial judge, prosecutor and corporate attorney. But it's not enough for a high court hopeful to be a creature of the law.

She must also be a recognizable member of the human race. She must be one of us even as she prepares to leave us for the rarefied pinnacle of judicial power.

"I am an ordinary person," she said, "who has been blessed."

Obama attributed to Sotomayor, a child of Puerto Rican transplants and a Bronx housing project, the "wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life's journey."

Some Republicans scoffed when Obama foreshadowed the selection saying he wanted a justice with a common touch and "the quality of empathy." What matters, they say, is judicial skill and fealty to the Constitution.

But the politics of biography is a game played by all sides in Washington and did not begin with Obama and his own compelling life story.

Ordinary Woman: Sonia Sotomayor and the Fight Over ‘Empathy’....