Sonia Sotomayor: Barack Obama's Ideological Soul Mate

Mickey Kaus [1] points to an NYT article [2] about Sonia Sotomayor's service on some kind of New York housing handout board a couple of decades ago, which documents both her Obama-like Who? Whom? worldview and her anti-Obama tendency to rub people the wrong way.

“She wanted lower-income people served, and that’s a good goal,” said Royce Mulholland, who represented the state’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal on the board. “But we also explained that the insurance program was intended to serve moderate- and middle-income apartments — and we only provided the insurance, which means we had very little leverage.”

Ms. Sotomayor did not confine her scrutiny to the balance between low- and middle-income housing.

After receiving a report about the agency’s affirmative action program in 1989, she requested a breakdown of the number of black and Hispanic workers. Later that year, when she was informed that just 8 percent of the agency’s contracts went to businesses owned by women or members of minorities, she called its performance “abysmal.”

“It was like a boys’ club when we came there,” recalled Hazel Dukes, who is black and joined the board about the same time as Ms. Sotomayor. “We knew how to be pushy. We were like bees in their bonnet.”

Fioravante G. Perrotta, a former agency board member, did not care for Ms. Sotomayor’s views. Mr. Perrotta recalls her as conscientious and knowledgeable, but he said she was an “extreme partisan” on questions of class and ethnicity.

“She made it very clear that she was very liberal and a Democrat,” Mr. Perrotta said, “and that really should have been a nonpolitical organization.”

Basically, Sotomayor is what Barack Obama would be if he had never mastered his "I have understood you" [3]Jedi mind control shtick where he recounts his interlocutor's argument more eloquently that his conversational partner put it himself, thus persuading 99% of the people he talks to that he shares their views. After all, if he understands my views, how could he possibly not hold my views?

John Carney at Business Insider [4] offers a more lucid explanation of what this government thing-a-mabob was supposed to do, and how Sotomayor's activism is relevant to today's mortgage meltdown.