one thing about this alito nomination that i am actually happy about: it might be a sign that the whole "stealth nominee" strategy is dead.
ever since robert bork's nomination was killed by the crazy stuff they found in his academic writings, presidents have tended to pick nominees with increasingly short papertrails. miers was the logical conclusion of that trend. what little trail she had was mostly privileged and thus inaccessible. she was an almost completely blank slate, leaving us with little more than the president's bare assurances that she would be a good justice. alito, at least, has a long record of appellate-level judicial decisions. while they aren't a perfect indication of how he would rule as a supreme court justice (as a circuit judge he couldn't vote to overturn supreme court decisions that he disagreed with), they at least give some indication of how he approaches issues.
i have this ideal that a confirmation hearing should be about exploring what kind of a justice the candidate would be coupled with a debate over what kind of justice we want. they never turn out that way and my ideal is probably unrealistic given the politics of the whole thing. but one major barrier to even approaching that ideal is the "stealth nominee" strategy. given how badly the stealth strategy backfired with harriet miers, i am hoping we never see that degree of stealth in a candidate again.
