Can we have a little talk about sexism?
Let's be honest here.
Sometimes presidents pick women, or minorities, because they can't continually nominate white males. That doesn't mean those chosen aren't superbly qualified, but it does mean that another factor was taken into consideration. You can call that affirmative action, or you can call it common-sense diversity, but no president today could get away with an all-male Cabinet, or a Supreme Court that would be chronicled in a book called "The Brethren."
Recent reports indicate that George W. Bush was looking for a woman for his second nominee to the high court. Fine. He had a lot more choices available than when Ronald Reagan picked Sandra Day O'Connor, in an era when there weren't that many women as appellate judges or senior law partners.
Now, with the president arguing that Harriet Miers is the single most qualified person in the United States to sit on the Supreme Court, Ed Gillespie, Laura Bush and others are saying her critics may be sexist.
Translation: I can consider gender factors in making my choice, but anyone who raises questions about whether this non-judge is qualified to sit on the nation's highest bench is doing so because she's a woman.
Does that smack of a double standard? Would conservative pundits really be praising a man with the same lack of judicial experience or intellectual writing?
In fact, I would argue that resorting to the old you're-attacking-her-because-she's-a-woman argument is itself a bit sexist, because you're asking potential critics to hold Miers to a different standard because she is a woman. (And don't believe politicians don't think about this. Some Republicans were salivating at the prospect that the Democrats might have to oppose Janice Rogers Brown, a black woman, and tick off two constituencies.)
There is one point where I would grant that gender may be a factor in the Miers coverage. That's in the snickering over the starry-eyed devotion that an unmarried woman gave to Bush, pronouncing him "great" and "cool" and all of that. This plays into a certain stereotype, since it's hard to imagine a man building his life around a male boss.
Otherwise, the profiles noting that Miers even ordered the rewriting of the White House Christmas card really don't turn on gender. They reflect that she has no other paper trail.
The whole approach, as my Post colleague Ruth Marcus puts it, reinforces the suspicion that there is an inevitable trade-off between quality and diversity. . . . The Miers nomination feels less like the natural result of women's progress and more like bean-counting tokenism:
By the way, the Smoking Gun has many of Miers's mash notes to Bush and other correspondence.
