“I feel this is the right vote for me, and quite frankly, for the country,” Graham said on the Senate floor, TPM reports. “She’s definitely more liberal than a Republican would have chosen, but I do believe elections have consequences.”

During the Senate confirmation hearing, Graham riddled Sotomayor with questions about her supposedly “nasty” temperament, her “wise Latina” comments that he said revealed bias and “racial politics,” and grilled her on whether she knew the difference between elected officials and appointed judges in the federal government.

By the final day of the hearing, however, he was defending her against the criticism of Republican witnesses.

Today, perhaps because he recognized early on that “only a complete meltdown” would thwart Sotomayor’s confirmation, Graham said President Obama deserves “deference” for his Supreme Court pick, and added that she is “one of the most qualified nominees to be selected for the Supreme Court in decades.”

As for her “wise Latina” remarks that he found so troubling during the hearing, he said: “The speeches are troubling but, you know what, I’ve given some speeches that may have been troubling to those on the other side.”

Krakauer was shocked, shocked:

The key line, of course, is “African Americans are more fundamentally rooted in the American experience.” Obama did not expand on this, and nor did Anderson Cooper ask a follow up. So did Mr. Obama mean that African Americans are more rooted in American experience than other Americans, or more rooted in American experience than the African experience?

The second one! He didn’t expand on it because he was talking about Africa. It’s hard to even imagine a more banal comment about the African diaspora. But how did Krakauer’s attempt to stir up angry right-wing comments go? Pretty well:

When the President of the United States makes such a blatantly racist comment your skin should crawl.

… what can one expect from a hopelessly elitist, hard-Leftist, white-man-done-owe-me-forty acres-and-a mule African-American mind?

He’s segregating into groups, and saying whites and Asians aren’t as rooted in America because there have been white and Asian immigrants reciently.

Obama is clearly saying that african Americans are more rooted than white people. It’s his wise Latina moment.

There’s really nothing Obama can do or say that doesn’t drive some elements of the right around the bend.

Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women. As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans.

Buchanan’s role as the last really unreconstructed racist in American public life has been a fascinating sideshow to the seemingly inevitable Sotomayor confirmation.

So I went back to the speech today to see what exactly she did mean by that remark, which she now admits was “a bad idea.”  And in context — of the speech, who she was talking to and the academic theorists she was citing — it makes a lot of sense.

Here’s the statement in the context of a few paragraphs:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

For anyone who truly wants to understand where Judge Sotomayor is coming from — even based purely on her speeches, as her Republican critics keep saying they want to take seriously — it’s worth reading the entire speech from start to finish.

Here it is.

Sotomayor attempted to align her comment about how a “wise Latina” would in some circumstances reach “a better decision” than a white male judge with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s earlier statements that “a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases.”“I don’t think that anyone would think we intended to say that we would make wiser decisions,” said Sotomayor today, after Kyl read portions of her 2001 speech at Berkeley back to her. “I intended to talk about the value that life experiences had,” she said. “The words I chose, taking the rhetorical fluourish, was a bad idea. I do understand that there are some who have read this differently, and I understand why they are concerned. But I have repeated, more than once, and if you look at my history on the bench I do not believe that any gender or race group has an advantage in sound judging. And I also believe that every person regardless of their background can be good and wise judges.”

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“No words I have ever spoken or written have received so much attention,” said Sotomayor. Speaking carefully, looking occasionally down at her hands, Sotomayor declined to take the path recommended by many pundits and offer an outright apology for her words. She was, she said, speaking to young Latinos and trying to inspire them. She didn’t believe that race or ethnicity made one person better at the job than any other person. “Every person has an opportunity to be a good and wise judge regardless of their background and experience.”

This obviously won’t be the only bite at the apple, as most of the Republicans on the committee have broadcast their intent to grill Sotomayor on this.

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Sessions’ game plan was fairly well teased out by months of coverage: he attacked Sotomayor on her jokey statement that the circuit courts were “where policy is made,” on her “wise Latina” speech, and on the Ricci case. On her legal philosophy: “Call it empathy, call it prejudice, or call it sympathy, whatever it is, it is not the law.” And after he was done, his staff passed out copies of five incidences of Sotomayor referring to “wise Latinas.”

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Critics focused on artist Roman Genn’s rendering of Sotomayor’s eyes. As a caricaturist, of course, Roman exaggerates his subject’s natural features, and Sotomayor has squinty eyes, especially when she smiles. One cringes at having to explain such things, but so it goes when dealing with people who are willfully dense and humorless.

And there you have it.

Not since Rose Mary Woods made “18″ famous has a number so absorbed the attention of the media and political establishment. But with President Barack Obama’s nomination of Second Circuit judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter, Washington has become transfixed by “32″–the number of words in a startling passage from the Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture that Sotomayor delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law in 2001 and published the following spring in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal.

A Google search returns 2,020 results for “32 words” plus Sotomayor. Another Google search returns 32,800 results for “16 words” plus Bush, referring to the president’s 2003 State of the Union speech and his claim that Saddam Hussein had sought enriched uranium from Africa. If you want an example of how far the conservative movement’s discussion of Sotomayor has gotten from the actual fight over the court, here you go.