What does it matter? ultimately spinning the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor isnt going to accomplish anything. This is especially true when you try to portray her confirmation as angering hispanic. Whether hispanic people are or are not happy with the confirmation of a latina to the SCOTUS will only be borne out by time. Writing an attack article calling the confirmation a loss for the President serves no purpose. Yet Fox News persists in writing articles that seem more like fund raising mailers than informative news pieces.
Specifically im talking about this article which calls the confirmation of Judge Sotomayor a political loss for not only the President but for everyone who voted in favor of her confirmation.
But Thursday's vote was not a win for the White House. The latest Zogby poll showed that Americans were tied 49% to 49% on whether Sotomayor should be confirmed. That's worse than any Supreme Court nominee in recent history except for Harriet Miers. Even Judge Robert Bork had less opposition, with those favoring his confirmation exceeding those who opposed him by a three-percent margin.
Even among Hispanics, the group Obama was targeting with this nomination, a Gallup poll shows she lacks majority support, with 47% in favor and 43% opposed. Moreover, Zogby shows that a majority of independents oppose her, as do small business owners.
The final confirmation vote of 68 - 31, with poll numbers like these, means that President Obama has not scored the big win that he wanted with this nomination by playing racial politics. It's a mixed result at best, and if her rulings from the bench show a clear liberal philosophy then the end result will be negative for the White House and Democrats.
You know your off to a bad start when you cite a zogby poll. If instead you were to look at a gallup poll from mid july you might find that 55% of those polled supported her confirmation ant this number is steady since the announcement of her nomination. That number is in line with an abc poll from about the same time period as well as a hotline poll. Only Rasmussen has a number below 50% and thats not surprising given how their polling tends to lean GOP.
As for how the GOP is doing with the latino population, it aint good. As Kos pointed out in a post on friday,
Republicans were already lagging badly with Latinos, yet somehow, they managed to lose a net 24 favorability points over the course of three months.
Maybe that isnt about Sotomayor but the correlation certainly seems to be high. So why does Fox continue to pretend that the bashing of Sotomayor has done something other than hurt the GOP? How does this set them up for the future?
I highly doubt that the continues attacks against sotomayor or obama are designed to act as a restraint on her future behavior. It seems unlikely that a supreme court justice will be so afraid of fox news denigrating her that she alters her judicial opinions in any way. Its not that justices dont take into account the prevailing public opinion on issues, they cant help but notice them, but sotomayor simply wont care about fox news because her behavior doesnt matter. Fox news does what it does regardless of reality.