the kicker

Sotomayor Has Been "Blessed"* In Many Ways…

May 26, 2009

…. but “blessed” with children is not, as far as we know, one of them. Until this morning. When Politico’s Mike Allen and Jonathan Martin apparently described Sotomayor in an article as a “Latina single mother,” according to Media Matters’s Jamison Foser and Josh Marshall at TPM. I attribute this to Foser and Marshall, in part, because I didn’t catch the original article from this morning which Politico has since “updated” — as in, it seems, disappeared from the text the “single mother” part of the “Latina single mother” phrase without copping to the slip-up. Is this how Politico normally handles “corrections?”

(Even if Sotomayor were a mother — and I haven’t seen it reported anywhere else, even fleetingly, that she is — I’m not sure I’d blame her for keeping that quiet, or at least not bringing her offspring to the official nomination announcement as did John Roberts in 2005, only to have the kids’ outfits and hairstyles panned as “costumes” by the Washington Post‘s Robin Givhan).

*Sotomayor this morning called herself an “ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.”

Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.