Damn That Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein pretty much gets it right on Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan when he says that Kagan looks a lot like Obama himself.

When Obama announced Kagan's nomination, he praised "her temperament, her
openness to a broad array of viewpoints; her habit, to borrow a phrase from Justice Stevens, 'of understanding before disagreeing'; her fair-mindedness and skill as a consensus-builder." This sentence echoes countless assessments of Obama himself.

Obama is cool. He makes a show of processing the other side's viewpoint. He's more interested in the fruits of consensus than the clarification of conflict. In fact, just as Kagan is praised for giving conservative scholars a hearing at Harvard's Law School, Obama was praised for giving conservative scholars a hearing on the Harvard Law Review. "The things that frustrate people about Obama will frustrate people about Kagan," says one prominent Democrat who's worked with both of them.

Still, I've been thinking that all day myself and hate to admit that Klein wrote it first. Damn you, Ezra Klein.