Kagan's Emails Reveal Brusque Approach

Elena Kagan's email record from when she was in the Clinton White House has gotten some attention for the brusque attitude they reveal:

Rummaging through four years of e-mails can offer a pretty good window into someone’s personality. In the case of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, emails from her time at the Clinton White House show not only her keen intellect and political acumen, but the New Yorker in her as well. She seemed to relish a good policy fight, had little patience for those who were unprepared for meetings, and took a jaundiced view of feel-good actions that weren’t likely to produce results.

When a White House aide circulated a proposal in 1998 for an executive order increasing the federal government’s focus on children, Kagan let loose.

“I confess to feeling somewhat baffled by this—an executive order on children saying what??” Kagan wrote in an e-mail sent to deputy chief of Staff Maria Echaveste and copied to three other senior aides. “We have many different initiatives that focus on children…education policies, child care policies, health policies, etc. We shouldn’t trivialize our work in this area by issuing an executive order telling everybody to [do] everything they can for every child.”

Kagan was similarly biting when she saw a draft of President Bill Clinton’s 1997 State of the Union address including a passage where Clinton was to say he hoped to be a “repairer of the breach,” a phrase that comes from the Bible’s book of Isaiah.

“That quote from Isaiah is the most preposterously presumptuous line I have ever seen," she wrote. "The president would deserve it if the press really came down on him for this."