Obama proves he's no change agent

Candidate Obama called for racial unity but struggled to explain why he'd spent two decades attending a church where the pastor, Jeremiah Wright, spewed hatred. When half-hearted attempts to distance himself from Wright didn't work, Obama ultimately disavowed his longtime adviser.

Now president, Obama has endorsed a woman whose words suggest she thinks in ethnic terms first. "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences," Sotomayor said in 2001, "would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Lest anyone wonder about the context of Sotomayor's remark, she was explicitly addressing former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's adage that "a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases."

So, Sotomayor does not believe justice can be blind. Given Obama's oft-stated desire for justices with "empathy," one might wonder whether her empathy will extend to all.

But Sotomayor's comments do the most damage to Obama's image as a politician who rises above America's bitter old racial divides. The president is endorsing the view that we are bound by identities we have from birth and cannot change, and undermining his own past words about our "shared destiny."

Obama survived the Wright controversy with his unity credentials intact. Now he is pushing people back into their corners, not drawing them out.

What could have been a moment of justified pride for all Americans at the first Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court instead threatens to be a moment of division. It calls to mind his wife's remark during last year's campaign about being proud of her country for the first time.

How many passes do we give Obama before we conclude he is just another politician willing to exploit a divisive issue? And that, ever in campaign mode, he hopes to bait Republicans into further casting themselves as the party of angry old white men?

Some conservatives would love to "Bork" Sotomayor's nomination for her comment, as well as another one about the federal bench being "where policy is made." But unlike the Democrats of 1987, who tarred Robert Bork as a right-wing extremist and blocked his nomination to the high court, the Republicans of 2009 don't have a majority in the Senate.

A filibuster would fail if even one Republican senator adhered to the old principle, however tattered by now, that presidents deserve great deference from senators in appointing federal judges. Republicans could try to score political points by tarnishing Sotomayor, but it's a plan likely to backfire in the long run given the GOP's need to court Hispanic voters if it's ever to regain a majority nationally.

The better bet is tying the nomination to all the other differences between Obama's campaign rhetoric and governing reality. He isn't the change agent on antiterror policy that liberals thought he was, the fiscal pragmatist that independents thought he was, or the champion of a new, transparent politics that so many Americans wanted to believe that he was.

So as the Sotomayor nomination moves forward, pay attention to what the would-be justice says. But listen also to what President Obama says, how he defends or backs away from Sotomayor's words and the fallout they cause, just as he did with Wright. Pinning down this president requires a truly wise man, or woman.

Reach Kyle Wingfield at kwingfield@ajc.com.