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If Clarence Thomas wasn't ready to be a Supreme Court Justice, is Obama ready to be President?

The Wall Street Journal notes Obama's statement that he would not name nominated Clarence Thomas...

"I don't think that he, I don't think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretation of a lot of the Constitution."

... and compares the records of the 2 men at the time they presented themselves as ready:

By the time he was nominated, Clarence Thomas had worked in the Missouri Attorney General's office, served as an Assistant Secretary of Education, run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and sat for a year on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's second most prominent court....

Meanwhile, as he bids to be America's Commander in Chief, Mr. Obama isn't yet four years out of the Illinois state Senate, has never held a hearing of note of his U.S. Senate subcommittee, and had an unremarkable record as both a "community organizer" and law school lecturer. Justice Thomas's judicial credentials compare favorably to Mr. Obama's Presidential résumé by any measure. And when it comes to rising from difficult circumstances, Justice Thomas's rural Georgian upbringing makes Mr. Obama's story look like easy street.

The WSJ goes on to diagnose Obama's "political habits of mind" and to knock him for "instinctively revert[ing] to the leftwing cliché that the Court's black conservative isn't up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are."

I just heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio reading this editorial and making much of that charge of racism.

Full post as published by Althouse on August 18, 2008 (boomark / email).