Supreme Demographics

As Barack Obama, who changed the face of America's executive branch, prepares to name his first Supreme Court justice, speculation focuses as much on demography as it did during his presidential campaign last year.

Does he "have to" name a woman? Will his choice be a Hispanic woman or perhaps a Lesbian? Is political correctness running amok?

Not if you look back at Supreme Court history which, before the nasty Bork confirmation fight in 1987, is widely believed to have been beyond politics in a bipartisan search for the best legal minds available.

When FDR railed at the "nine old men" who blocked New Deal initiatives and made his ill-fated attempt to expand the Court by as many as six members, the only demographic issue was the naming of Jews, to the consternation of Justice James Clark MacReynolds, a Woodrow Wilson appointee and avowed anti-Semite who refused to talk to them or acknowledge their presence.

In those halcyon days, not long after women got the right to vote, the "best legal minds" were to be found almost exclusively in a white Protestant male gene pool that reflected not the diversity that Obama stresses but a minority of Americans that constituted a ruling elite.

Now that those barriers are down, there are heated arguments about which former outsiders have the strongest claim to representation, but when voters put Obama in the White House, they were giving him the power to decide what the redefinition of "best legal minds" should be for the 21st century.

After all the sound and fury die down, he will do just that.

Obama's Mom, McCain's and Chelsea's

Today John McCain is unveiling a sassy TV commercial with his 96-year-old mother to remind voters about his good genes and American values. Iffy as it may be to call attention to his age, the ad underscores the diversity of motherhood in this campaign.

Roberta McCain, who gave birth to her son at a Naval Air Station in Panama, where her husband, the son of an Admiral and a future Admiral himself, was based, radiates the aura of a strict, no-nonsense parent out of a bygone era. John McCain always knew exactly who he was.

Barack Obama's mother was a dreamer with, in his words, a "combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in...but also a certain recklessness...always searching for something. She wasn't comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box." Her travels and exotic marriages produced a unique bi-racial man who has spent his life finding and creating himself.

Somewhere between these extremes of certainty and self-invention is Hillary Clinton's biographical journey from a well-to-do suburban childhood that took her to college as a Goldwater girl, transformed her into a Eugene McCarthy protester against the Vietnam war and eventually the first woman within striking distance of the presidency.

In this post-Victorian, post-Freudian era, motherhood comes in all shapes and sizes, producing remarkable diversity in the generation that will define the 21st century.

Happy Mother's Day to one and all.