Not As Much Harm, Not As Much Foul

I definitely agree with Digby on the point of the optics of President Obama seeming to concede the point about Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment look bad, and the media pounced yesterday. However, I think the media needs to be faulted for seeing what they wanted to see. Here's the whole context:

Obama: I'm sure she would have restated it, but if you look in the entire sweep of the essay that she wrote, what's clear is that she was simply saying that her life experiences will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people are going through that will make her a good judge.

That's about 1/5 hedging and 4/5 putting it in context, which is what pretty much every other Dem talking head has done. I think it goes too far to say, as David Shuster did yesterday, that this represents a concession and the White House "caving the point". Cable news lives to play things up like this, but even for them this is kind of ridiculous.

In my LA Times today, this "concession" was buried inside a larger process story about moderate GOP folks telling the hard right to STFU about the "racism" and "Latino KKK" claims. And by the way, they're not. So I think it's a blip, not a major thing. Sotomayor was always going to restate that particular statement in confirmation hearings, but I don't get the sense that she'll grovel about it.

If this is a prelude to the President conceding points for no good reason, I'd agree that it's a problem. But I don't see much of a concession here.