Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

"Kagan strikes me as the Democratic elite's elitist: free of any conviction that is not caged in a web of Clintonian caution, punctiliously diligent in every aspect of her career, motivated by a desire never to offend those with power, and rewarded in turn by the protection and praise of these elites."

Andrew, I just read that to my mom. 

She said "She sounds like a nice Jewish girl.  Wants to make everyone happy."

They keep rolling in, you ornery Dishies. A reader writes:

Gosh you are pissing me off today!  Toobin said they have been friends for 30 years, and he couldn't tell you what she is passionate about. If she is so private she doesn't share her own beliefs on many issues, I don't understand how anyone would expect her to share her sexual preference. She hasn't openly appeared with a partner, so whether she is straight, gay or just wants to be friends with a bunch of books is hardly my business.

The other thing I find disconcerting is everyone seems to assume because she is 50 and not married she must be gay? Couldn't she just be single? Maybe she hasn't ever met anyone she wants to marry, or someone who wasn't intimidated by her fierce intellect and ambition. Maybe she, and by extension, the White House are telling the truth, and have said all they are going to say.

I always know when someone has no idea how being gay can affect one's entire life-experience when they use the term "sexual preference." It's like a taste in rock rather than country. They would never use that context about a heterosexual. Another writes:

You are confusing me with your slightly accusatory tone, as if this is a huge conspiracy of silence. How is this the fault of the White House? They might be respecting her wishes. Or maybe she is celibate or even asexual.

When Robert Gibbs was asked a straightforward question about this question yesterday, he replied, “It’s not anything I’m going to get into.” Then this:

“I’m just not going to get into somebody who is doing what that person was doing on CBS’s website. This is about who she is going to be as a justice,” Gibbs said.

But Obama has made it quite clear that he believes that who Kagan is going to be as a justice is directly related to biography. Does Gibbs believe that being gay is utterly irrelevant to someone's biography and life-experience? If he does, he is revealing just how out of touch this White House is with the lives of gay people. Ron Klain won't clarify anything either:

“Elena went through the same vet that everyone else goes through for the Supreme Court is all I’ll say.”

Do they realize how weird these coded non-denial denials are going to sound eventually? A lower-level, twenty-something spokesman, Ben LaBolt, flatly denied that Kagan was gay not so long ago. So why cannot Gibbs and Klain repeat his clear statement? It would end this speculation permanently. Another:

Has it occurred to you that Ms. Kagan may not know her identity?  If she is indeed gay, is it not possible that it is something that she herself has not come to terms with?

And if that is the case, does she not deserve the right to continue to sift through that privately, and still apply for a job that she is professionally qualified for irrespective of her sexuality however it is defined at this stage?

Yes, it has occurred to me. The price of this kind of high office, however, is a surrender of some biographical privacy – especially when biography is the key factor that Obama has cited in selecting his two nominees. It is naive to believe otherwise. We know how she felt about her own bat mitzvah, for goodness' sake. It's one thing to assert privacy; it's another to create a narrative of oneself that appears to reveal private life but actually conceals it. Besides, there are ways to avoid such scrutiny – such as not accepting a nomination for the Supreme Court. It's not as if these questions are being asked of a private person. They are being asked of someone who may well exercize enormous power over countless lives in a tenured position for life and about whom her biography matters, according to the president. Another:

Did you ask the same question about Sonia Sotomayor that you are now asking about Elena Kagan?

In her early twenties Sotomayor married a man, but she has been single ever since when they divorced in her late twenties, and she has had no children. Did you demand information about her sexual identity, as you now demand it about Kagan? If not, why not? Is it simply because Kagan was never married to a man? Please consider for a moment the immense presumptiveness this implies.

Well, Sotomayor had some kind of private life that clearly tipped the scales toward heterosexuality. Kagan appears to have none at all. Another: 

The only people interested in Kagan's sexual proclivities are drooling rightwingers and you.

So? You think I'm gonna fall for the guilt-by-association canard? The bigots believe this is a slur of some kind. I believe it's potentially a massive step forward, which is best dealt with forthrightly. The Christianists are looking at this through the lens of politics, as are those Democrats who, as one put it to me last night, may think they "can sneak one through." I'm looking at this through the lens of someone whose job it is to scrutinize those in power, and who, frankly, would be deeply, deeply proud to see an open lesbian as a Supreme Court Justice. For the record, I'd support the nomination, as I almost always defer to the president on these matters, unless something truly game-changing emerges. But something is off here. And they know it too.

The Guardian deciphers a photo.

The details of what looks like a Lib-Tory pact are dribbling out. They are pretty amazing (although they will have to be confirmed). Here's one:

Nick Robinson has been told by high-ranking Tory sources that Ken Clarke will become chancellor with Vince Cable as his deputy, while George Osborne will be demoted to the Department for Business. A bitter blow for the shadow-chancellor, if true.

Clarke is a very popular Tory grandee. Cable is an equally popular fiscal hawk among the Liberals. The markets will like this. The demotion of Osborne, one of the least popular of the Cameron clique, does not surprise me. This truly surprises me:

BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson says the Con-Dem agreement to be announced imminently includes fixed term parliaments, starting now. Which means that there can't be a snap election – this coalition will have to last four years.

The Americanization of British politics continues. First the TV debates, now fixed parliamentary terms. If that's true, it means that the new government will not be a caretaker before another snap election, but a potential fusion of the Liberal and Tory brands over several years – perhaps the embryo of a whole new center-right party. It feels a little like Canada's Progressive Tories.

A must-read on her rare article, "Presidential Administration":

This is a beautiful, extremely perceptive work, closely observed, brilliantly reasoned, and cautious. In it, Kagan notes the increase of presidential power as Congress builds the administrative and regulatory state. The powers that Congress vests in regulatory agencies are necessarily assumed and controlled by the president. Kagan writes as a detached observer, yet there is much to suggest her admiration for the evolution of the strong presidency in the period after World War II. Her career choices, often pushing back her academic career to accept appointments in Democratic administrations, reflect an attitude of engagement with it. All of this leads to the assumption that as a Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan will be no enemy to the powers of the executive. As my readers know, I am not sympathetic to this attitude. But I am impressed with Kagan’s powers of analysis and presentation just the same. My suspicion–and it’s only a suspicion–is that Kagan is a liberal in the sense of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, someone who has faith in the power of the executive to shape a better and more just state. She pays lip service to the limitations on executive authority contained in the Constitution, but she’s generally in the thrall of executive power.

The Evening Standard says Brown has resigned as PM, after the collapse of Lib-Lab talks. Politics Home relays that "the prime minister's spokesman denies Gordon Brown has resigned." James Forsyth reports:

The Lib Dems are holding a meeting of both their MPs and the Federal Executive at 7.30pm. It is now widely expected that this meeting will approve a coalition deal with the Conservatives. Those who have taken the temperature of the Lib Dem Federal Executive say that approval is in the bag.

Then this:

George Pascoe-Watson, the respected former political editor of the Sun, reports that the Lib Dems have six cabinet posts and Nick Clegg will become deputy prime minister. If so, the outsiders have won far more ground than anyone imagined possible and the landscape of British politics has changed – perhaps forever.

The FT is live-blogging. If this pans out, it's a huge achievement for the Tory negotiators. To construct a fiscally responsible Tory-Lib coalition government under this kind of pressure cannot have been easy.  And AV would not make one-party government impossible in the future but would make the system fairer. It also gives the Liberals a chance to prove their governing mettle.

So in one day, the prospect of a permanent left-of-center future for Britain has shifted to the possibility of a Whiggish Toryism emerging as a vital, stabilizing force for the coming weeks, months and maybe years. Amazing. I'm still trying to absorb it all.

David Brooks' column today really helped crystallize for me my qualms about Elena Kagan. Her life, so far as one can tell, is her career, and her career has been built by avoiding any tough or difficult political or moral positions, eschewing any rigorous intellectual debate in which she takes a clear stand one way or the other, pleasing every single authority figure she has encountered, and reveling in the approval of the First Class Car Acela Corridor elite. The NYT profile – which is superb apart from its editorial decision to excise any account of any non-trivial private life (she smokes cigars!) since high school – is chilling in its assessment of a human soul in steady, determined pursuit of approval and power.

Name one risk she has taken with her career. I can't.

And when you notice that she intended to be a Supreme Court Justice from her childhood, and when you see how the hearings process shifted after Bork toward favoring the blander, less substantive, less controversial liberal avatars who now sit on the court, her strategy makes total sense. But where has she experienced the brunt of the law on ordinary people, as the president has described one of his criteria for the court? I guess if you regard Larry Tribe and Charles Ogletree as victims of the world, you could make a case for her empathy. But apart from that? Not much that I can see.

Where is the struggle in her life story that could possibly equate with Sotomayor's? The NYT is very keen to let us know that the Upper West Side where she grew up was not as tony as it is today. Er, that's about it. Michael Waldman hilariously cites her real world experience as part of the Clinton domestic policy apparatus. Not a single anecdote in her life-story would be out of place in a Rhodes Scholar application – and I mean that as damning. Every one is just quirky enough – but equally framed to show she represents no conceivable threat to any conceivable liberal interest or authority.

Kagan strikes me as the Democratic elite's elitist: free of any conviction that is not caged in a web of Clintonian caution, punctiliously diligent in every aspect of her career, motivated by a desire never to offend those with power, and rewarded in turn by the protection and praise of these elites. Here is Walter Dellinger's almost comically balanced, well-polished, piece of bullshit:

“Her open-mindedness may disappoint some who want a sure liberal vote on almost every issue. Her pragmatism may disappoint those who believe that mechanical logic can decide all cases. And her progressive personal values will not endear her to the hard right. But that is exactly the combination the president was seeking.”

Notice how every single virtue – open-mindedness, pragmatism, "progressive personal values" whatever that means) – is framed as naturally meeting resistance from those outside the sequestered liberal judicial elite. And this opposition merely confirms – how could it not? – the broad beneficence of one of their own, leavened with the necessary sprinkling of inoffensive anecdotage. Even her youthful smoking – what a rebel! – is balanced by her attempt to regulate tobacco in her later years, and, in case anyone might think of her as a puritan, the cigar anecdote is thrown in for good measure.

It's all so comfy, isn't it? Those poker parties. Those committee meetings. No wonder Jeffrey Rosen and Jeffrey Toobin validate her. But at least they have offered an opinion or two from time to time on issues every thinking person would discuss. She hasn't. And remember that we are told that her early family life was a cauldron of debate and discussion. In a way, talking about the closet of sexual orientation is beside the point. Her entire life seems to have been a closet – in the pursuit of a career.

David Brooks calls this generational elite pattern – which is far broader and wider than Kagan's lone example – "disturbing." I find it depressing. And none of us has any clue whatsoever what kind of justice she would be – and that's fine with those in the elites who need only their private knowledge and web of social networks to give one of their own so much power over so many, without ruffling her composure one little bit.

Elijah Sweete looks at the record.

Listen to John Reid, a serious Labour official, talk sense about Brown's gamble:

More Labour discontent here. Money quote:

“I think this is a bad decision, the wrong thing for the country and the Labour party,” said Mr Reid, a long-time opponent of Mr Brown. “If this is the new politics then I don’t think people are going to be very attracted to it.”

“It would be mutually assured destruction,” he said, adding: “If we appear to be snubbing the electorate … I think we will rue the day.”

Mr Reid said David Blunkett, his fellow former home secretary and Labour MP for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, agreed and had authorised him to say so.

Their sentiments were shared by several colleagues. Some warned the Government could be held to ransom by Scottish and Welsh nationalists, whose handful of Commons seats would be crucial to a “rainbow coalition” against the Tories.