A Missed Opportunity

But probably an inevitable miss this time.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination, not only in America, but in the world. Yet it has produced exactly as many Supreme Court Justices as the Quakers or the Huguenots, namely one each. As much to do with the "Southern" as to do with the "Baptist"? Undoubtedly. But in the clamour for a Protestant, and with a President who has both a record for unpredictability and a second coalition to build, this felt like white Evangelicalism's year. A constituency, after all, which will be among the first to grow very used indeed to healthcare once it is in place, which provides plenty of the young men harvested in neoconservatism's Original Sin-denying wars, and which still very largely retains the spirit of William Jennings Bryan.

Like Catholics, they changed parties over abortion and have seen the Republicans do absolutely nothing about it, not even with six Catholics, five of them classified as conservatives and at least four with some sort of connection to Opus Dei, on the Supreme Court. The Catholics largely gave up waiting in 2008, and went home anyway. The right appointment this year could have caused the white Evangelicals to follow suit in 2012. But it was not to be. The academic advance of the white Evangelical community, though striking, is still not quite there yet. There have long been so many Jewish lawyers that the question is not so much that Kagan will be the third on the present Court, as that she will be only the seventh ever. The law also became a well-travelled route uptown for several Catholic ethnic groups. Among the white Evangelicals, that process is now well underway.

Not only has Kagan never sat as a judge, but her published work is silent on a great many issues. She is assumed to be pro-abortion, but no one really knows. She vigorously opposed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, but that is no longer a live issue. She failed to speak out against the Bush Administration's constitutional outrages: surveillance, detention, rendition. But that might stand her in good stead when it comes to confirmation. Sad, but true. And she told her hearing for Solicitor General that there was no constitutional right to same-sex "marriage", making her nomination the end of the impending challenge to Proposition 8, which was passed on the same day as California gave its Electoral College votes to Obama, and delivered in no small measure by his base in the black church.

So this may not be the best day for the Obama Coalition, the new Democratic Party. But it is certainly not the worst.