7 Comments:

Conservatives just love to play that race card. They condemn affirmative action, and at the same time they scream from the rooftops that Condo Rice and Janice Rogers Brown are African-American, and Attorney General Gonzales is Hispanic.

By  Anonymous, at 1:59 PM  

Yep. Republicans play the race card every time. I think that was one of the reasons J.C. Watts left Congress.

By  Hammer, at 2:06 PM  

Further, Brown only received support from 50.8% of California voters.

Pure spin. About a third of the voters declined to vote, as they did on each of the candidates. Of those that did vote, it was three-to-one in favor of Rogers Brown.

Let's state the numbers another way: of the four candidates, she had the second-highest "for" count, and the lowest "against" count. Now is that a lie, a damned lie, or a statistic?

Actually, the remarkable similarity in the results leads me to believe that almost no matter who is on the ballot, one half say yes, one sixth say no, and one third say nothing at all.

By  Joseph Thvedt, at 4:42 PM  

I don't know that we can say much of anything about judges based on vote counts since I can't believe even a tiny fraction of voters know anything about the people they are voting on. I follow politics closer than most AND I'm an attorney but I almost never have an opinion on judicial elections. I ask my friend Newmie, a criminal defense lawer, if any of the judges in our county are bad enough to vote against and just take his word for it. He has also told me in the past that all other things being equal he jsut "votes for the Jews and the women."

By  Jambo, at 5:03 PM  

50.8% is not spin -- it's a fair measure of a fair defintion of the meaning of "strong support". Say, for example, 100 voters go to the polls to vote for President but only 1 bothers to vote for a judge. That's 99 with no opinion. According to Coleman, that's 100% support from the voters. That is not accurate.
On the other hand, my percentages were exactly correct. 50.8% voted in favor of her and 49.2% either voted against her or didn't vote at all. My presentation contains all the relevant facts.
Coleman's presentation is designed to mislead. My presentation of the same facts is accurate. You can disagree about whether the 50.8/49.2 split is meaningful or not, but you can't say that it's misleading.
Plus, as you say, all the judges received about the same votes. To me, that indicates "average" support, not "strong" support.

By  Hammer, at 8:56 AM  

Yes, Coleman is disingenuous when saying she had strong voter support. My third or fourth reading of your original post finally made it clear to me that you did explicitly make that claim. Blame my short attention span for not bridging the 80-odd words between Coleman's "strong support" and your "only received support."

However, I'd say that your statement that "49.2% of the ballots cast were either votes against Brown or blank" was factually true but far from complete. The complete results:

For: 50.8%
Against: 16.1%
No vote: 33.1%

You toss "against" and "no vote" together without mentioning that the latter outnumber the former by over two-to-one. If your only aim was to rebut Coleman's "strong support" claim, then you're right and I'm wrong.

Another thing -- not to get all Bubba on you, but let's talk about what the meaning of "is" is. You say "Rogers Brown is not well-qualified," and cite an evaluation from 1996 describing her "relative inexperience." Surely nine years on the Supreme Court of our most populous state negates some of that. A quick scan of the Wikipedia entries on the current US Supreme Court Justices show only about 4 (Kennedy, Souter, Ginsberg, and Breyer) of 9 had similarly long tenures on either state supreme courts or on the US Court of Appeals.

By  Joseph Thvedt, at 11:31 PM  

"Well-qualified" is a term of art based on ABA ratings. As stated in the original post, "Brown received a low ABA rating of 'qualified/not qualified' for her nomination to the D.C. Circuit."
According to the traditional measure, Brown is not "well-qualified". This is a different rating than Brown received before being appointed to the California State Court.

By  Hammer, at 9:23 AM  

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