She Sounds Like Any Other Wacko Leftie To Me

Kagan doesn't sound like so much of an enigma to me (she considered D'amato to be ultraconservative?):

She was a product of Manhattan’s liberal, intellectual Upper West Side — a smart, witty girl who was bold enough at 13 to challenge her family’s rabbi over her bat mitzvah, cocky (or perhaps prescient) enough at 17 to pose for her high school yearbook in a judge’s robe with a gavel and a quotation from Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court justice.

She was the razor-sharp newspaper editor and history major at Princeton who examined American socialism, and the Supreme Court clerk for a legal giant, Thurgood Marshall, who nicknamed her Shorty. She was the reformed teenage smoker who confessed to the occasional cigar as she fought Big Tobacco for the Clinton administration, and the literature lover who reread Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” every year.

...

“Elena is open-minded, pragmatic and progressive,” said Walter Dellinger, an acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration who is close to both Ms. Kagan and the White House. “Each of those qualities will appeal to some, and not to others.

...

Yet as a young writer for The Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper at Princeton, Ms. Kagan offered insight into her worldview. She had spent the summer of 1980 working to elect a liberal Democrat, Elizabeth Holtzman, to the Senate. On election night, Ms. Kagan drowned her sorrow in vodka and tonic as Ronald Reagan took the White House and Ms. Holtzman lost to “an ultraconservative machine politician,” she wrote, named Alfonse M. D’Amato.

“Where I grew up — on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans,” Ms. Kagan wrote, in a kind of Democrat’s lament. She described the Manhattan of her childhood, where those who won office were “real Democrats — not the closet Republicans that one sees so often these days but men and women committed to liberal principles and motivated by the ideal of an affirmative and compassionate government.”

...

The young Ms. Kagan was independent and strong-willed. Mr. Lubic recalls her bat mitzvah — or bas mitzvah, as it was then called — in a synagogue where Elena clashed with the rabbi over some aspect of the ceremony.

“She had strong opinions about what a bas mitzvah should be like, which didn’t parallel the wishes of the rabbi,” Mr. Lubic said. “But they finally worked it out. She negotiated with the rabbi and came to a conclusion that satisfied everybody.”

...

In her senior year, after she left the paper, she joined Mr. Spitzer in signing a manifesto, “Campaign for a Democratic University,” that called for a greater role in student governance. As a history major, Ms. Kagan dove into the roots of American radicalism in a senior thesis titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933.” In the acknowledgments, she thanked her brother Marc, whose “involvement in radical causes,” she wrote, “led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas.”

In 153 pages, the paper examines why, despite the rise of the labor movement, the Socialist Party lost political traction in the United States — a loss that she attributed to fissures and feuding within the movement. “The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America,” she wrote.