Elena Kagan

So what do I think of Solicitor General Elena Kagan, President Obama's choice to succeed John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court? I don't know, really, for she hasn't offered many clues to what kind of justice she would be.

Elena Kagan has been touted by the President as a "trailblazer," as she was the first female dean of Harvard's law school and developed a reputation there for being open to different points of view and building consensus. She's already served Obama as Solicitor General of the United States, arguing cases for the government. Her one failure? She argued to prevent elections from being tainted with corporate money on behalf of the citizens of the Union . . . but lost to Citizens United.

Maybe her lack of a paper trail is a good thing, because it won't start any ideological battles in the Senate confirmation hearings. Ideological battles have already started outside Washington, though, with right-wing talk radio commentators blasting Kagan for refusing to let military recruiters set up shop at Harvard Law School because she opposed their policy on gays openly serving in it. Some people have suggested that she is gay because she's been known to . . . brace yourself . . . play softball! Odd, given that softball is the female version of baseball, so organized to let women play the sport.

One battle that has already started is her lack of judicial experience, a condition that didn't bother Republicans when President Nixon named Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist to replace the esteemed John Marshall Harlan II on the Supreme Court in 1971. Nor were Republicans ready to disagree with President George Bush when he named Clarence Thomas - with only two years' experience as a judge and a horrible record as director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission - to the Court in 1991.

And if the vast judicial experience of Samuel Alito leads to rulings like Citizens United, I'll pass, thanks.

Actually, many liberals are disappointed with Kagan's selection because they find her too accommodating to conservative judicial philosophy. They don't think Kagan is liberal enough; they wanted someone as far to the left as Antonin Scalia is to the right. But given united Republican opposition against such a judicial appointment in the Senate - and given the fact that the United States remains at heart a center-right nation, an anomaly in the Western world - anyone hoping for Obama to bring about the second coming of William O. Douglas was bound to be disappointed.