Lost in the rush of polls and soon to be forgotten (as the Democrats begin the blame-a-thon, and the moving vans arrive to pack off the casualties of Obamaism) was a multi-car pile-up in the left lane of legal scholarship. The culprit, we are reminded by the scalding wit of this observer, was Harvard law professor and Supreme Court advocate Laurence Tribe, who managed in a letter to his former student and now president to embarrass two Supreme Court justices (Sonia Sotomayor, for limited intellect; and Anthony Kennedy, for being perpetually influenced and never influencing). But it is Tribe’s own toadyism that is the real cringe-inducer. (It is not often we see such ”pathetic grovelling and job-begging” from Harvard’s best-known liberal prof).
But that got me thinking. Doesn’t Tribe’s warning about Sotomayor’s shortcomings apply with equal force to Obama, himself?
Bluntly put she’s he’s not nearly as smart as she he seems to think she he is, and her his reputation for being something of a bully could well make her his liberal impulses backfire and simply add to the fire power of the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas conservative wing of the Court GOP.
You can understand why Obama and Sotomayor were sympatico.
And second, we must hold Tribe and the rest of the Harvard faculty partially responsible for the president’s distorted self-image. Those who were witnesses to Obama’s years as a law student can vouch that Tribe and his colleagues were no less slobbery when it came to student Obama some decades ago. They had their eye on him and figured he’d go far. His every word elicited praise. And as with the professors’ cooing, his placement on the Harvard Law Review was, it seems, based on factors other than legal scholarship, of which he produced none.
It is a pity that Sotomayor, Obama, and many less prominent names wind up with oversized egos and jobs for which they are underqualified. For that, as with so many other counterproductive contributions, we can blame, to some degree, the leftist intelligentsia who populate academia and the mainstream media. We often bear the brunt of their obsession with “diversity” (oh heavens, not the intellectual variety!) and their assurance that liberal conformity=brilliance and glibness=intellectualism. The good news is that the mainstream media are dying, and there is an election in 2012. The bad news: Sotomayor is there for life.
