I know that Janet Napolitano is floating around on the White House's short list. I don't really understand why: She's neither very liberal nor a great legal thinker nor armed with radically different life experiences than most members of the governmental elite. Rather, she was an effective moderate politician and, before that, an apparently skilled attorney general. But nevertheless, she'd be an enormously controversial nominee on the Court itself. Her early rise to prominence came as the attorney for...Anita Hill. So I guess what you can say about her is that there's probably no nominee in the country who would do more to piss off Clarence Thomas.
