How Alito Looks Under the Lens

Like any half-decent Hollywood thriller, every serious political brawl in Washington needs at least one good villain. It's not nearly as much fun or as easy to score points and hurl invective back and forth without a compelling one-dimensional character at the center of it all. Robert Bork played that role magnificently in his 1987 epic Supreme Court battle, as did Clarence Thomas in his more understated performance four years later. More recently, during the bloody conservative revolt over the Supreme Court nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers, the real villain turned out to be her chief backer, a President who dared tell his loyal base to just trust him on this one.

So Democrats can be forgiven for appearing a bit downcast in the days following the introduction of Bush's newest nominee, Federal Appeals Court Judge Samuel Alito Jr., 55. The Princeton and Yale Law--educated career public servant may have the most solid conservative judicial record of any Supreme Court nominee since Bork. It's more than enough to satisfy most Republicans looking for as close to a sure thing as possible on hot-button issues like abortion, the death penalty and the roles of religion and race in American society. But like John Roberts, the Bush Supreme Court nominee who sailed through confirmation hearings in September, the unassuming, affable Alito is far from the partisan flamethrower Democrats were itching to fight over.

The fact that so many in the legal community, on both sides of the political aisle, laud Alito as a serious, fair legal thinker not given to overarching theories or ideological tantrums is bad enough for the Democrats. And his record of protecting freedom of expression doesn't help matters. Also, it's pretty hard to demonize a man who regularly donned a uniform when coaching Little League and once spent a week of vacation at the Philadelphia Phillies fantasy baseball camp. The White House, says Democratic strategist Joel Johnson, "has accomplished the task of getting beyond the base problem in a way that has not completely lit the opposition on fire." A disappointed Democrat summed up the problem this way: "He's a nice guy, and he doesn't drool."

That doesn't mean some sort of battle won't be waged, especially now that both sides have two months before Alito's confirmation hearings begin in early January. On the contrary. Far from a stealth candidate like Miers, who only a month ago was being praised by Bush for not being from the "judicial monastery," Alito has "more prior judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in more than 70 years," as the President noted. Alito's voluminous record, including some 300 opinions, offers a wealth of material for both sides to pick over. Within days of his nomination, his dissent argument for upholding a Pennsylvania law requiring a woman to notify her husband before having an abortion and his opinion supporting a city hall religious-holiday display had become some of the reasons to set up the barricades.

THE BATTLE STATIONS