It's Official: We Elected a Moderate

Forget all the paranoid right-wing racist emails which still litter the internet regarding President Barack Obama. (I still love saying that after 8 years of the previous asshole. PRESIDENT Barack Obama!)

Forget most of the radical change those of us on the far left hoped for with his election. Barack Obama is simply a moderate. And that's still very refreshing after what we've been through.

Now Mr. Obama is preparing to select his first Supreme Court nominee to replace retiring Justice David H. Souter. In interviews, former colleagues and students say they have a fairly strong sense of the kind of justice he will favor: not a larger-than-life liberal to counter the conservative pyrotechnics of Justice Antonin Scalia, but a careful pragmatist with a limited view of the role of courts.

“His nominee will not create the proverbial shock and awe,” said Charles J. Ogletree, a Harvard professor who has known the president since his days as a student.

Mr. Obama believes the court must never get too far ahead of or behind public sentiment, they say. He may have a mandate for change, and Senate confirmation odds in his favor. But he has almost always disappointed those who expected someone in his position — he was Harvard’s first black law review president and one of the few minority members of the University of Chicago’s law faculty — to side consistently with liberals.