Excerpt
President Obama’s aides were laying down the law. They had invited liberal activists to the White House two weeks ago to discuss his coming Supreme Court selection, but they were not asking for candidates.
Instead, they told the activists not to lobby for their favorites in the news media or talk down candidates they opposed. The message, as one surprised visitor heard it, was “get on board or get out of the way.”
In the months leading up to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s selection this week, the White House methodically labored to apply lessons from years of nomination battles to control the process and avoid the pitfalls of the past, like appearing to respond to pressure from the party’s base or allowing candidates to be chewed up by friendly fire.
The selection process for Mr. Obama’s first Supreme Court nomination brought together a group that had been thinking about this moment for a long time, from a president who taught constitutional law to a vice president who voted on the confirmation of every member of the current court. Sitting in the room were advisers like Ronald A. Klain and Cynthia Hogan, who have been involved in nomination fights going back to Clarence Thomas.
Even before Justice David H. Souter publicly announced nearly four weeks ago that he was retiring, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff who lived through two nominations during Bill Clinton’s presidency, commissioned a strategy memorandum from Mr. Klain intended to dictate the process. Secrecy was paramount. As the decision neared, aides disguised meetings on the subject even on the president’s internal schedule by blocking out time under the label “Chief of Staff Strategy.”
From the beginning, Mr. Obama had been focused on Judge Sotomayor, a federal appeals court judge from New York, officials said Wednesday. She had a compelling life story, Ivy League credentials and a track record on the bench. She was a Latina. She was a woman. She checked “each of the grids,” as Mr. Obama’s team later put it. And by the time the opportunity arrived, it became her nomination to lose.
Over the course of the last four weeks, Mr. Obama nursed doubts about Judge Sotomayor and entertained alternatives, aides said. He called around, asking allies about her reputation for brusqueness. At times, he grew increasingly enamored of other candidates, particularly Judge Diane P. Wood, whom he knew from Chicago. But by the time Judge Sotomayor left the White House last Thursday after what Mr. Obama told aides was a “dense discussion” of constitutional law, he was pretty much sold.
“You had to knock her off the pedestal,” Mr. Emanuel said, “and nobody did.”
The selection process got its start in the weeks after Mr. Obama’s election last fall when he gathered advisers in a conference room in downtown Chicago one day. The court was on his mind.
“Just because we don’t have a vacancy right now doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work on it,” he told the group, according to participants. “The day we get a vacancy, we want to have a short list of people ready.”
Mr. Obama already had one in mind and threw out several names, including Judge Sotomayor, aides said. His new White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, got to work assembling more names.
Another example of what is different from the Bush Administration. Good, think ahead, planning.
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