Kagan likes "real Democrats -- not closet Republicans...committed to liberal principles..."

Yet as a young writer for The Princetonian, the student newspaper at Princeton, Ms. Kagan offered clear insight into her worldview. She had spent the summer of 1980 working to elect a liberal Democrat, Liz Holtzman, to the Senate. On Election Night, she 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 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."

It was perhaps the last time Ms. Kagan wrote so openly of her own political beliefs. Last year, at her confirmation hearing to become solicitor general, senators focused less on her politics, but on whether she was too much in the ivory tower, with too little lawyerly experience to argue cases before the nation's highest court. That question will almost certainly come up again, given that Ms. Kagan has never been a judge.

"One of the things I would hope to bring to the job is not just book learning, not just the study that I've made of constitutional and public law, but of a kind of wisdom and judgment, a kind of understanding of how to separate the truly important from the spurious," Ms. Kagan said. "I like to think that one of the good things about me is that I know what I don't know and that I figure out how to learn it when I need to learn it."

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10130/1057069-84.stm?cmpid=news.xml#ixzz0nWj7ai1E