In the rush to judgment of John G. Roberts Jr., the president's nominee to the Supreme Court, everybody's looking for the angle, to determine where he does or doesn't represent a position on this, that and the whatever. Pundits and politicians, from carefully nurtured ideological perspectives, search for clairvoyance, as if a homemade crystal ball will tell them where he will come down on cases.
Such magic and wizardry is fine in fiction, as young Master Harry Potter could no doubt tell you, but crystal balls are excruciatingly unreliable for determining how justices will apply the Constitution to specific cases. You could conduct a seance with Dwight D. Eisenhower to see what he has told Earl Warren in paradise, or ask John F. Kennedy whether Whizzer White lived up to his expectations.
George W. Bush, still dealing with his defeated critics' accusation that he's a dim bulb in the Washington firmament, has shown himself to be considerably brighter than the preening pundits who confidently told us he would nominate someone else. He has put his own expectations where his mouth is, choosing a man of character, competence and determination who is not likely -- "likely" being the operative word -- to legislate from the bench. In an age of identity politics that divides the country on issues of race, "gender" and ethnicity, the president ignored the parochialists to nominate (gasp) a white man, the generic politically incorrect creature that in faculty-lounge lore is second only to the dead white male as irredeemably undesirable. (A dead white man was not available.)
He chose a Catholic who may oppose abortion personally but who promises to examine the issue in relation to the Constitution. Many who support a woman's right to an abortion acknowledge that the way an abortion right was discovered two centuries after the Constitution was written was nevertheless bad law. The lack of a long paper trail requires friends and critics alike to study his remarks on behalf of his various clients for indications of how he might rule as a justice of the high court. Not necessarily any more reliable than a crystal ball.