It's no big secret what the White House is doing. As Kimberly Strassel writes in today's Wall Street Journal,
Ground Rule No. 1, as decreed by the president, is that this is to be a discussion primarily about Judge Sotomayor's biography, not her qualifications. ... Ground Rule No. 2, which is that Republicans are not allowed to criticize Judge Sotomayor, for the reason that she is the first Hispanic nominee to the High Court.
... And Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center put it well when he said,
"The media elite are helping to build Sotomayor up as a folk hero, whose sympathetic life story is supposed to trump issues of judicial philosophy or her controversial statements about using the courts to reshape the law..."
Clearly, the strategy for confirming Sotomayor is to talk about her compelling biography -- not her rather concerning judicial philosophy. The thing is, though, as long as Democrats are telling an emotional and aspirational story -- and Republicans are (at worst) talking about reverse-racism and (at best) talking about the importance of originalism versus activist judges, we will lose. As the saying goes, "logic leads to conclusions, but emotion leads to action." Appointing judges who interpret the Constitution is a logical argument, but confirming the first Latina is an emotional one.
The way I see it, the only chance conservatives have is to fight fire with fire. This means that if the Democrats want to tell the Sotomayor story, we conservatives must tell an equally emotional story about someone who has been negatively impacted by Judge Sotomayor. ...
Matt Lewis hits the nail on the head with this one.
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