[Mb-civic] Too Perfect to Know the People? - Richard Cohen - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Too Perfect to Know the People?

By Richard Cohen
Thursday, September 8, 2005; Page A29

I sometimes think the best thing that ever happened to me was, at the 
time, the worst: I flunked out of college. I did so for the usual 
reasons -- painfully bored with school and distracted by life itself -- 
and so I went to work for an insurance company while I plowed ahead at 
night school. From there I went into the Army, emerging with a 
storehouse of anecdotes. In retrospect, I learned more by failing than I 
ever would have by succeeding. I wish that John Roberts had a touch of 
my incompetence.

Instead, the nominee for chief justice of the United States punched 
every career ticket right on schedule. He was raised in affluence, 
educated in private schools, dispatched to Harvard and then to Harvard 
Law School. He clerked for a U.S. appellate judge (the storied Henry J. 
Friendly) and later for William H. Rehnquist, then an associate justice. 
Roberts worked in the Justice Department and then in the White House 
until moving on to Hogan & Hartson, one of Washington's most prestigious 
law firms; then he was principal deputy solicitor general, before moving 
to the bench, where he has served for only two years. His record is 
appallingly free of failure.

I envy him for it and admire him as well. He has the sort of first-class 
intellect, not to mention an impish sense of humor, that commends itself 
to the high court. We would not want a dunce or a mediocrity to decide 
the sort of matters that come before the court. Unlike, say, the 
presidency, the Supreme Court is no place for a sluggish thinker who 
thinks -- if that is the word -- that in the schools the non-theory of 
"intelligent design" ought to be taught along with the theory of 
evolution. (What next, alchemy and chemistry?) But when Sandra Day 
O'Connor leaves the Supreme Court, it will be without any member who has 
spent so much as a day as an elected official. Roberts will not change 
that. He, too, never worked the beach on Labor Day. If he has a 
politician's talent -- not weakness -- for compromise, we don't know it. 
If he has great leadership qualities -- or any at all -- we don't know 
it. If he can bring unanimity where it matters -- as Earl Warren did in 
1954 with the school desegregation decision -- we don't know it. All we 
really know is that he is young (50), smart and makes, as they say, a 
nice appearance.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR2005090702134.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050908/af38278a/attachment.htm