I follow the Supreme Court appointment sweepstakes with interest, although I have to admit I don't have a highly developed view on who should be the appointee. I think he/she had better be smart, or Alioto/Roberts will eat them for lunch. I suppose the appointee will have to have a taste for combat, and a willingness to lose a lot of battles. And I suppose that any President who takes the long view in this context will go for young.
That's about it for me, but lately I've had some occasion to listen to some bad-mouthing of Elena Kagan, the solicitor general and former Harvard Law dean who just might be the front-runner. She's a mediocrity, I'm told, she's a paper pusher, just look what she did for the Harvard faculty (implied rhetorical answer: nothing).
I'm not ready to sign on to all of that, but it has crossed my mind: could it be that she is Tim Geithner, the compleat bureaucrat, the one with the brief case permanently attached to her arm? Would I be correct to infer that "she's Tim Geithner" is not necessarily what you would want these days as a recommendation for a top job either?
BTW, nobody asked me but I'd have to say something similar about the vaunted Harvard Law faculty--to me they are mostly a bunch of faceless technocrats. Oh, sure, faceless technocrats with dynamite resumes, but how many of those guys have you ever heard of? Maybe part of the problem is just that Harvard is so big. Still, I can remember the names of a lot more people at Georgetown (also big)--saying nothing of Yale, Chicago, Columbia, NYU.
Well, okay, not all faceless technocrats.
Meta fn.: No, I have no idea what the headline means. It's just a guy thing.
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