New York Time’s Calls Obama a Pragmatist on Supreme Court Appointees

From the Times:

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.

Former students and colleagues describe Mr. Obama as a minimalist (skeptical of court-led efforts at social change) and a structuralist (interested in how the law metes out power in society). And more than anything else, he is a pragmatist who urged those around him to be more keenly attuned to the real-life impact of decisions. This may be his distinguishing quality as a legal thinker: an unwillingness to deal in abstraction, a constant desire to know how court decisions affect people’s lives.

Would his judicial pragmatism be like his fiscal conservatism?  Would his judicial pragmatism be like his bipartisan approach to the stimulus and budget?  Would his judicial pragmatism be like his pragmatism on Guantanamo and water-boarding and national security?  Would his judicial pragmatism be like his pragmatism on the swine flu which prevented him from sealing the southern border?

Who is the Times trying to kid?

He is going to appoint a leftist flamer.  Why try to deny it?