{"id":883,"date":"2009-05-26T17:41:15","date_gmt":"2009-05-26T17:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/05\/sotomayors-socialist-yearbook.html"},"modified":"2009-05-26T17:41:15","modified_gmt":"2009-05-26T17:41:15","slug":"sotomayors-socialist-yearbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/05\/sotomayors-socialist-yearbook.html","title":{"rendered":"Sotomayor&#8217;s Socialist Yearbook Quote"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m slightly surprised that the White House press office gave out this image, from her 1976 Princeton yearbook, in which she quotes Norman Thomas.<br \/>\nNorman Thomas was, of course, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Norman_Thomas\">the leading American Socialist politician of the 20th century. <\/a><br \/>\nPerhaps they figured it would come out eventually so they wanted to be able to say, &#8220;That&#8217;s old news. We thought it was so inconsequential, we mentioned it ourselves.&#8221;  Or perhaps they felt that substantively didn&#8217;t matter; Norman Thomas was a pretty mainstream and respected figure, as socialists went. And his quote is universal.  Or perhaps they didn&#8217;t notice.<br \/>\n<span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/imgs\/Sotomayor_NassauHerald_%282%29.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Sotomayor_NassauHerald_(2).jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/128\/import\/assets_c\/2009\/05\/Sotomayor_NassauHerald_(2)-thumb-550x279-5311.jpg\" width=\"550\" height=\"279\" class=\"mt-image-center\" style=\"text-align: center;margin: 0 auto 20px\" \/><\/a><\/span><br \/>\nUPDATE: <a href=\"http:\/\/gawker.com\/5271119\/sonia-sotomayors-socialist-yearbook-quote-sure-to-inspire-idiocy-hilarity\">Gawker offers this theory:<\/a> &#8220;or perhaps the White House planted it there knowing that it&#8217;d send the wingnuts into a hysterical frenzy, thereby distracting the sane wing of the party, what little there is left of it anyway, from forming any sort of cogent opposition to Sotomayor, making them all look like rabid fools in the process, just as they have each and every time they&#8217;ve tried to throw the socialist card on Obama in the past? Then again, maybe Obama&#8217;s just so confident in his nominee that he doesn&#8217;t care about trivial horseshit like her quoting a socialist over 30 years ago in her college yearbook?&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m slightly surprised that the White House press office gave out this image, from her 1976 Princeton yearbook, in which she quotes Norman Thomas. Norman Thomas was, of course, the leading American Socialist politician of the 20th century. Perhaps they figured it would come out eventually so they wanted to be able to say, &#8220;That&#8217;s&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Sotomayor&#039;s Socialist Yearbook Quote - Steven Waldman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/05\/sotomayors-socialist-yearbook.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sotomayor&#039;s Socialist Yearbook Quote - Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I&#8217;m slightly surprised that the White House press office gave out this image, from her 1976 Princeton yearbook, in which she quotes Norman Thomas. 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He's also the author of the Founding Faith: Politics, Providence, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, which has been published by Random House. Before co-founding Beliefnet in 1999, Waldman was a political journalist, serving as National Editor of U.S. News & World Report and National Correspondent for Newsweek. 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