Have you ever had the awful experience of applying for a job and being told that you were overqualified? That's just happened to John Roberts. Nobody's really been able to find anything bad about Roberts, which is now being given as a reason to distrust him. Roberts, says columnist Richard Cohen (he's the one who suggested, only half-kiddingly, that Judge Judy would be a good replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor), has a record that is "appallingly free of failure" (you can't make stuff like this up). Cohen would like Roberts to be better able to identify with "real" people, as in:
Theodore Sarbin, a social psychologist who died Aug. 31 at the nice age of 94. Sarbin's claim to newspaper space was his 1988 report recommending that the military stop discriminating against gays and lesbians. This is the sentence that caught my attention: "As a young man, he rode the rails as a hobo, an experience he would later say helped him identify with people on the margins of society."
Yeah, a chief Supreme Court justice who rode the rails as a hobo, that's what we need, not a clear, rational thinker who understands the law and the Constitution.
