The Weight of the "Personal Story"

Estrada's "story" didn't matter all that much

Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings solidify the prominence of the "personal story" era in contemporary politics. Candidate Barack Obama, perhaps the most narcissistic politician ever to descend on the political scene, was the forerunner in this movement. Throughout the campaign, we witnessed how personality and background consistently eclipsed experience, qualifications, issues and philosophy. To this day, he rarely gets through a speech without making some conspicuous reference to his personal story or background. But, as several Republican senators pointed out during today's confirmation hearings, it's a one-way street, this personal story bit. Miguel Estrada, a brilliant conservative Hispanic, had a similarly impressive personal story, like Sotomayor, but he saw his prospects for judicial advancement derailed by Senate Democrats, who gave scant notice to his story and labeled him an ideologue. Ditto for Janice Rogers Brown, who barely survived the senate's gauntlet and was eventually (barely) confirmed as a federal judge. Personal stories, you see, matter only if you're a doctrinaire liberal. If you happen to be a qualified conservative with a great personal story, you're out of the mainstream and you're story is totally irrelevant. Just ask Clarence Thomas.

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As a rough, unpolished afterthought, could the explosion in popularity of things like blogs, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc., have something to do with the heightened importance placed on one's "personal story" in politics and pop-culture? Not that these things are bad in themselves (if used properly) but for many, they appear simply to be shallow outlets for endless self-promotion.