Sotomayor is no John Roberts, who, when nominated by then-President Bush, was portrayed as the white picket fence American dream, a JFK for the Supreme Court, with his dancing son Jack in the role of John-John. But that’s not what President Obama and his team wanted. They got what they wanted, a different kind of American story: another woman to make the Supreme Court feel less like a boys’ club, a Hispanic and, most of all, someone with an inspiring story, a rags-to-riches tale who will make the public empathize with her as much as she’ll empathize with those who come before her, a quality Obama had said he’d been seeking.

The announcement was full of emotion; Sotomayor herself was obviously moved, and said so, and Obama himself observed that the judge’s mother “has been a little choked up.” It couldn’t be free of emotion, not with Sotomayor’s story.

“Born in the South Bronx, she was raised in a housing project … Sonia’s parents came to New York from Puerto Rico during Second World War … When Sonia was 9, her father passed away, and her mother worked six days a week as a nurse to provide for Sonia and her brother — who’s also here today, is a doctor, and a terrific success in his own right — but Sonia’s mom bought the only set of encyclopedias in the neighborhood, sent her children to a Catholic school called Cardinal Spellman, out of the belief that with a good education here in America all things are possible,” the president said.

“With the support of family, friends and teachers, Sonia earned scholarships to Princeton, where she graduated at the top of her class, and Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, stepping onto the path that led her here today.”

Watch video of the announcement: 

Along that path, Obama said, Sotomayor has been a prosecutor, a litigator, a trial judge and finally served on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. She was nominated to become a federal district court judge by President George H.W. Bush, and elevated to her current post by President Clinton.

The right has already gone after Obama for saying that he was looking for “empathy” in a justice, and that attack will almost certainly be repeated now. But Sotomayor did a good job of explaining what that means, at least when it comes to her.

“This wealth of experiences, personal and professional, have helped me appreciate the variety of perspectives that present themselves in every case that I hear,” she said. “It has helped me to understand, respect and respond to the concerns and arguments of all litigants who appear before me, as well as to the views of my colleagues on the bench. I strive never to forget the real world consequences of my decisions on individuals, businesses and government.”

It will be hard to counter that, and some conservatives may ultimately elect to keep their gunpowder dry and live to fight another day.

It does seem to be somewhat damning — but the full context, as blogger Orin Kerr noted, makes the comment a different matter entirely. He writes, “The comment arises when she is explaining the difference between the district court and the court of appeals, and thus the difference in clerking at the two different environments. In the district court, she says, the goal is justice in the individual case. You need to think fast, and make a decision immediately. In contrast, at the court of appeals, the judges are usually — not always, but usually — worried about how the legal precedent will apply to the next case. So you need to be more contemplative at the circuit court level.” (The full video, which isn’t embeddable, is available here; her remarks come at about 43:40 in.)

The dirt on Kagan is older. The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb, who was a spokesman for John McCain during the presidential campaign, dug up Kagan’s undergraduate thesis from Princeton, which is titled, “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933.” The excerpts from it that Goldfarb quotes make it appear as if she herself might be a socialist, or at least sympathetic to socialist ideas, and Goldfarb writes, “Her political sympathies (at the time) seem quite clear — and radical.”

Princeton History Professor Sean Wilentz, who served as Kagan’s thesis advisor (and who has previously written for Salon) told Salon that she is not a socialist, and that the question she was asking with the paper “was an absolutely standard” one about why the U.S. hasn’t had the same kind of radical movements that have flourished in the rest of the world.

“Was she sympathetic to the socialists? Only insofar as the socialists were raising urgent issues about industry and labor even before unions were quite legal nationwide,” Wilentz says. He added, “I’m proud of [the thesis]… I wasn’t the only one who liked it. She went on to win the Sachs fellowship to Oxford, which is about as prestigious a fellowship as Princeton awards.”

But Rosen, who is kicking off a series about “the strengths and weaknesses of the leading candidates on Barack Obama’s Supreme Court shortlist,” isn’t so sure. He starts off by covering her strengths, which to his mind include Sotomayor’s background, her education and her support from New York politicians. Her former clerks, writes Rosen, praise her “as a demanding but thoughtful boss whose personal experiences have given her a commitment to legal fairness.”

Also, “because Sotomayor is divorced and has no children,” Rosen reports, her clerks “become like her extended family — working late with her, visiting her apartment once a month for card games (where she remembers their favorite drinks) and taking a field trip together to the premiere of a Harry Potter movie.”

It’s hard to tell whether it’s weirder that Rosen just freely observes that Sotomayor’s clerks fill the baby-shaped hole in her heart (if she were a married mother, no Harry Potter for you, clerk suckers!) or that he feels OK about including it in the positive half of the story, in which he’s cataloging the judge’s “strengths.” You know, the ones that might qualify her for a spot on the Supreme Court of the United States.

But then Rosen gets around to Sotomayor’s weaknesses. And, depressingly, many of them, as reported by “people who have worked with her,” several of them clerks for other judges, include complaints about Sotomayor’s “temperament” and “her ability to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices.” So … she’s moody and lacks intellectual gravitas. Surprise!

The most serious concern, Rosen quotes a former clerk for another 2nd Circuit judge as saying, is that Sotomayor is “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench.” Not that smart? Well, that’s surely possible, but also one of the most readily available spears to throw at a woman in competition for a man’s job, especially when that job is a heavy intellectual lift. It’s also unsurprising, but grossly familiar, that questions about Sotomayor’s intellectual chops come after so much focus on how great an asset her background as an urban Puerto Rican woman is to her Supreme Court prospects. It seems a barely veiled setup, if not by Rosen than by his sources, for an affirmative action insinuation: that she is only in contention for the SCOTUS seat — and presumably was only at Princeton, and Yale, and at the District Attorney’s office, and on the 2nd Circuit, etc., etc. — because of her status as a minority.

And the bully part? That’s about how, in the words of the anonymous former clerk, she “has an inflated opinion of herself” and is “domineering during oral arguments.” The clerk also accuses her of asking questions that “aren’t penetrating.” Rosen sees fit to report the detail that during one of Sotomayor’s arguments, an “elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, ‘Will you please stop talking and let them talk?’” She just won’t shut up, see?

Perhaps the single most frustrating part of Rosen’s piece is his use of an observation made about Sotomayor to the New York Times by her colleague, 2nd Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes, that Sotomayor “is not intimidated or overwhelmed by the eminence or power or prestige of any party, or indeed of the media.” This sounds like a compliment to me and high praise for a potential Supreme Court nominee. But in Rosen’s view, it is simply a more felicitous version of the complaint that she won’t shut her trap.

Rosen points to other perfectly valid concerns about Sotomayor, some broad and some specific, including that former prosecutors have complaints about the tightness and quality of her opinions and that she may not present a “clear liberal alternative” to the conservatives on the court.

But when good questions about qualifications or politics are mashed together with low-budget aspersions about how brash, bossy and talkative a powerful woman is, it’s hard to take them seriously.