That George W. Bush, who was privileged to name two justices, placed two white men on the high court was not a result of his distaste for "identity politics." His first choice to fill the seat vacated by Sandra Day O'Connor was another woman, Harriet Miers. Her nomination was doomed by conservative activists enraged that Miers had no clear track record of opposing abortion. The same activists had great enthusiasm for the nomination of African-American Clarence Thomas to fill the seat vacated by civil rights pioneer Thurgood Marshall.

The Thomas nomination is, in fact, a fine measure against which to judge right-wing indignation at Obama's yet-to-be-named nominee.

Obama has said he will consider a person's life struggles and capacity for empathy in making his choice, comments that already have stirred much hot air. But Thomas' rise from a poverty-stricken community in rural Georgia to the rarefied corridors of the legal community was fundamental to the Republican marketing strategy for his nomination. "This man understands the difficulties of life," Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said of Thomas. "He has had a tough life but he's made it all the way. Anybody who takes him on in the area of civil rights is taking on the grandson of a sharecropper."

If Sotomayor is nominated, will we be told that her up-from-the-projects biography is irrelevant? Probably. Because if there is a single predictable element of judicial nomination struggles, it is that no hypocrisy is too blatant.