President Obama's first nominee for the Supreme Court arrives on the playing field with momentum that will be difficult to stop. At 54, Sonia Sotomayor is the ideal age and has all the right academic and judicial credentials. She would upgrade the court's diversity of gender and ethnicity. She has an inspiring personal story of aspiration, work and sacrifice. Her mother sat in the East Room of the White House weeping with joy at her appointment ceremony.

So how might this bullet train to the high court be derailed? That is the question for conservatives who oppose her (or may eventually do so), as well as for supporters who want to see her nomination confirmed as swiftly as possible.

Sotomayor will attract opposition for her views on abortion, gay marriage and other cultural issues. An unpopular ruling on affirmative action that she joined may soon be overturned by the current Supreme Court, with attendant publicity. And she has made several ill-advised remarks regarding policymaking from the bench and the advantages of judgment some Latinas may have over certain white males.

But these are the predictable squabbles over ideology and judicial philosophy and personal expression that one might expect from any judge likely to be appointed by a Democratic president in our time. The damaging quotations from speeches may well be handled in a few deft lines when Sotomayor settles in for a session with the Senate Judiciary Committee in July.

A potentially greater source of vulnerability may be implied by a term that President Obama and others have been using lately. The term is empathy. In the parlance of their party, Democrats use this word to mean sensitivity to the plight of the poor, the disadvantaged and the downtrodden. Why shouldn't a judge, exercising the great power the Constitution has reserved for the judiciary, show compassion for the consequences?

Republicans, for their part, regard empathy as a code word for emotion. They imply that emotion, in the context of jurisprudence, is tantamount to irrationality. Lately, Republicans have made frequent reference to "feelings," as in "the court should apply the law as written, irrespective of the feelings of the individual justices." Getting in touch with one's feelings might be good therapy, the conservatives say, but it's a lousy way to decide big cases.

An emphasis on feelings also plays to prejudices about Sotomayor's sex (the word hysteria is rooted in a Greek word for women) and ethnicity (the Latin character is almost synonymous with emotionality). But these subtexts function as undercurrents. The direct attack is on the notion that a judge who empathizes with people is a bad judge.

This is one way to read the frequent references being made to the symbolic statue of Justice, holding aloft the scales while wearing a blindfold. To be truly impartial, the implication would have it, one needs to be oblivious.

One can wonder whether any such concept of justice stands up to scrutiny. Is it really a superior intellectual system that seeks to apply only a dispassionate reading of laws written generations or even centuries earlier? Or is that a mental construct that glorifies the status quo, justifying economic and political arrangements as they are?

Empathy also implies a sharing -- whether of values or circumstances or experience. It may be obvious to some that any such identification constitutes a conflict of interest for a judge, especially a Supreme Court justice. But if the presence of such connections implies partiality, what does the absence of such connections imply?

Ultimately, Sotomayor has more going for her than any one nominee has any right to expect. In addition to her qualifications and attributes, she has the potent advantage of representing a group that is now the largest political minority in the U.S. and the fastest-growing. Hispanics are increasingly able to vote, and increasingly likely to vote Democratic. The last thing minority Republicans need right now is to deny a Hispanic a seat on a court that has never had one.

It is also dangerous for Republicans to go too far in seeking a dehumanized rationality on the high court. The public wants sensible and evenhanded judges. But there is little evidence that the public wants automotons.

When the last new justice, Samuel Alito, was appointed in 2005, he began his confirmation process as an unknown and a bit of a cold fish. The public did not fall in line behind his nomination until after his wife had fled the hearing room one afternoon in tears, distraught at the way her husband was being caricatured.

After that emotional moment, featured endlessly in the media, the polarity switch was thrown and the energy flowed in the nominee's favor. In the end, concerted Democratic opposition was unable to threaten his confirmation.

Sotomayor begins her confirmation battle with the emotional polarity already in her favor. So long as she maintains that advantage, and so long as the facts of her case remain as they are today, resisting her will cost opponents more than it gains them.

No one will ever mistake House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Dick Cheney for soul mates, but the two have a lot in common.

Lately, they have in common the issue of torture, and the burden of things they knew about it, did about it or said about it in the difficult months of late 2002 and early 2003.

Few periods in our history raise as many searching questions as that anxious year and a half between the September 2001 terrorist attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And the Republican Cheney and Democrat Pelosi bear the weight of those months as it falls on their respective parties.

Cheney defends the use of "extreme techniques" while refusing to call waterboarding torture. Pelosi insists she did not know about waterboarding despite claims to the contrary, and she accuses the CIA of lying to her and to Congress.

Both have been cast as scapegoats by forces both within and beyond their control. They have chosen to speak out, but they were also compelled to do so by their histories.

Both these partisan leaders are products of the political struggles they have seen and sought over the past generation. They come to the events of our time as embodiments of the electoral and ideological combat of decades past.

It sometimes surprises people to realize that this man and woman represent the same political vintage. Cheney has long cultivated an image of seniority and experience, personifying the grumpy grandpa. For her part, Pelosi is just as well-known for a glamor and a spitfire style that belie her age.

Yet Pelosi, at 69, is actually 10 months older than Cheney, who is still 68.

So why does Cheney come across as her uncle? Possibly because he has been in Washington politics for four decades. Pelosi was still serving on the San Francisco Library Commission when Cheney moved up to chief of staff in the White House of President Gerald Ford. That was in 1975.

In the later 1970s, Cheney was elected to Congress from his native Wyoming and Pelosi became the Democratic Party chair for Northern California. In the 1980s, Cheney moved up into the inner circle of GOP leadership in the House. Pelosi became the party chair for California and a member of the Democratic National Committee, jobs that would accommodate the five children she still had at home.

When her youngest entered high school, Pelosi ran in a special election for a vacant seat and joined Cheney in Congress. That was in 1987.

The two were members of Congress together for less than two years. Early in 1989, Cheney left to become secretary of defense for President George H.W. Bush. Pelosi stayed in the House, got on the Appropriations and Select Intelligence committees. Cheney flirted with a presidential run in the mid-'90s before settling into a corporate role at Halliburton.

Throughout the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the two could be found on opposite sides of the issues that divided Americans most profoundly: Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua, nuclear weapons, taxes and defense spending, abortion, gun rights and gay rights, Supreme Court justices and the balance between energy and the environment.

Their careers were steeped in the conflicts of their time. And, in a sense, they are bound together today by their lifelong investment in those conflicts. For 30 years, they have each raised millions of dollars and logged countless air miles for congressional candidates, from safe incumbents to long-shot challengers.

Such labor in the field makes a difference, but it also takes a toll. It can wear even the happiest warrior down until little but warrior remains.

President Obama has said he wants to open a new epoch in American politics. Throughout his campaign, and in the weeks that followed his election, Obama said he saw nothing to be gained by dwelling on the past. It was remarkable that he said this, in part because his own candidacy was based on opposition to the war in Iraq and other salient elements of the administration of George W. Bush. But he sensed that looking backward would be a distraction from his ambitious plans for the future.

Since his inauguration, of course, President Obama has found it increasingly difficult to maintain this focus. The past rises up on all sides, not just distracting but overwhelming. The torture conundrum, the photos of prisoner abuse, the fate of internees at Guantanamo, the next moves to be made in Iraq and Afghanistan -- all these persist, but the most perplexing is torture.

To some degree, Obama brought the torture issue to a boil himself by releasing in April the legal memos the Bush administration relied on to legitimize its interrogation methods. But his decision to do so reflected a realization that some issues from the past cannot be forgotten.

That is especially true when actors from the past remain so visibly onstage. In Pelosi's case, her role as senior House Democrat on Intelligence in 2002 clings to her. But more important, any culpability she has for what she may have known about torture at the time is magnified by her current elevation. The speaker, as everyone should know by now, stands next in the White House succession after the vice president.

Cheney's prominence is more voluntary. He might have left the capital and kept his own counsel. That's what his former bosses, both Presidents Bush, chose to do. But Cheney, the veteran of all these wars over all these years, cannot bring himself to leave the field.

Judging by recent polls, neither Cheney nor Pelosi has gained much popularity with their efforts to justify their performance in 2002 and 2003. Partisans on either side will defend their own, but watching these two war horses makes the rest of us wonder: What will it take to shake our preoccupation with the past?

Even before this week, it was apparent Dick Cheney would not go gently into the not-so-good night of a former vice president.

The man whom many consider the most powerful veep in history had already been far more vocal and visible than most of his predecessors in retirement. This week in particular, the former No. 2 has been out there almost daily, doing talk shows and giving a formal address to the American Enterprise Institute on the importance of interrogation techniques widely considered to be torture.

Along the way, he is also unburdening himself of opinions on everything else, from tax policy to the fate of the GOP to the choice of a commanding general in Afghanistan. Once known for his reticence and low profile, the man from Wyoming is suddenly his party's most prominent national figure and audible voice. He is having his catharsis, and having it abundantly.

The change is less in Cheney than in the surrounding circumstances. He stands out now in large part because no one else so senior and salient in the Bush administration has come forward to defend the extreme interrogations. And Cheney has come out swinging. He denies waterboarding is torture, denies breaking any laws in using it and insists plenty of high-placed Democrats knew about it. And when he says the Obama regime is making America less safe, he says it in the short, sharp, simple way that makes for a good crawl line on cable TV news.

Once he has your attention, Cheney insists the rough stuff was used to reveal new plots like the Sept. 11 attacks, not to get suspects to provide links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. He sidesteps the complex debate about whether torture yields unique results, reinforces what other techniques reveal or produces false leads. He also elides the equally challenging problem of torture's blowback effect: How much terrorism do we engender in our future by using these tactics today?

Grasping these nettles would not be useful to the vice president's point, which is that torture (by any name) works. In pushing this idea, he relies less on evidence than on the common, intuitive notion that torturing people until they talk makes people tell you things. Otherwise, why has torture been so common through the ages?

All the expert testimony in the world has a hard time counterbalancing that inexpert and rhetorical question. For many, no evidence ever will.

But that does not speak to Cheney's own motivation in his current media blitz. To understand his current drive to change the national conversation, we have to consider multiple motives.

First, Cheney is not a hired apologist or a campaign strategist but a true believer. He sees the Obama administration's rejection of waterboarding and other harsh tactics as weakening the overall U.S. defense against another massive attack. By questioning that policy, Cheney hopes to reverse it. He is defending his own anti-terrorism policy because he still believes in it.

Second, Cheney is a political scientist and amateur historian who can see the consensus emerging all around him with regard to the Bush administration. For the moment, at least, the consensus judges harshly the decision to invade Iraq and the eagerness to subject individual terrorism suspects to waterboarding -- in some cases scores of times. Cheney feels it necessary to get out there and defend what is left of the Bush-Cheney legacy, before the drumbeat of condemnation grows deafening.

Third, Cheney is exercising some of his personal First Amendment rights. He is a man of strong views, and it has been some time since he could express them freely. He endured eight years of a tight leash in a White House that listened to him (maybe too much) but thought others should not. When Cheney spoke in public in the later Bush years, it was nearly always to Rush Limbaugh or Fox News or to smaller audiences in the most loyal Republican states.

Cheney had tremendous, perhaps unprecedented influence in and around the Oval Office itself. But his public image, quite positive during his time as secretary of defense in the early 1990s, deteriorated badly. He became associated with an unpopular war, an unpopular oil industry and, of course, an unpopular Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney was largely responsible for Rumsfeld's role as secretary of defense in George W. Bush's administration, as Rumsfeld had been responsible for Cheney's rise in the Gerald Ford administration 25 years earlier.

And all that came before the hunting accident in Texas cast the shotgun-toting vice president as buffoon.

So the political side of the White House saw Cheney as a problem factor in the swing states and among the swing voters who decide national elections. The flip side is on display these days, as the Obama White House gleefully pounces on whatever Cheney says and gloats over his low personal approval ratings in polls.

Cheney knows all this. But in 2009, he no longer needs to care. If he finds himself exasperated by what he sees around him, he can jolly well answer his telephone, book himself a broadcast opportunity or two and fire back. How many other people who have lost their jobs in recent months can do the same?

I first met Jack Kemp 30 years ago in an oak-paneled room of the Wisconsin Club, a private venue for businessmen in downtown Milwaukee. He was there to address a luncheon meeting of the Pachyderm Club, obviously a Republican gathering, and I was there as a cub reporter for The Milwaukee Journal.

Kemp held forth for the better part of an hour on something he called "supply-side economics." The audience of traditional, Midwestern conservatives looked skeptical.

They were fine with Kemp's drive to cut taxes, especially the taxes investors pay on capital gains and dividends. They had no problem with the notion that these tax cuts would unleash freshets of capital and refresh economic growth.

But when Kemp talked about cutting the income tax rate by 10 percent each year for three years, some in the room asked how federal spending could be cut commensurately. Kemp said that didn't matter; deficits would not be a problem and growth would restore the budget to balance in time.

This last proposition did not sit so well with the Pachyderms, who began to drift away after getting their coffee. When the congressman paused for breath, I asked whether his deep tax cut and deficit owed something to the stimulative strategies John Maynard Keynes pushed during the Great Depression. Kemp's eyes got wide. "No, no it's not Keynes," he said, his face contorted in horror. "Stick around; I want to talk to you."

And so I stuck around to confront the persona of Jack Kemp. Having grown up in an American Football League town, I knew him as the charismatic quarterback who led the Buffalo Bills to two AFL titles in the 1960s. I knew he had moved on to politics, working for Gov. Ronald Reagan in California and then winning a seat in Congress in a Buffalo district. By the late 1970s, while still in his early 40s, Kemp was being promoted as a national figure, a good-looking ex-jock who liked to talk about ideas.

And did he ever. Once all the club members and other guests had disappeared, the congressman opened up his briefcase and poured out his program with all the passion he once brought to football. He waxed rhapsodic about the "Laffer curve," then regarded as a crackpot notion from a rather obscure academic. It purported to predict how lower tax rates would improve federal tax revenues and wipe out the budget deficit.

Of course, Arthur Laffer and his curve were to become much better known in 1981, when Reagan moved from California to Washington as president and pushed a modified version of the Kemp tax cut through Congress in his first months in office.

The early 1980s were a good time to be Jack Kemp. A new generation of like-minded youthful conservatives had begun to arrive and rise in the chamber — including Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, David Stockman and Dick Cheney.

But more important to Kemp was the rise of his ideas. The Reagan program looked radical at first, and the country took a while to climb out of the worst recession it had seen since the Great Depression. But when the economy turned up, Reagan's stock rose dramatically — and Kemp's did likewise.

He was a prophet of the positive. The GOP had to talk about expanding wealth and giving people a chance to do better. It had to stop being "the party of root canal," stop carping about the federal debt and deficits because those issues mattered only to those who would be voting Republican in any case. Kemp was all about reaching out to people who had never voted Republican, or at least not in decades.

Kemp moved the ball a long way for his party, and he got a fair share of attention for it. But he never got to wield much of the power his party won. He served nine terms in the House with his party mired deep in the minority, giving up his seat to run for president in 1988. That presidential campaign never quite got off the ground, and Kemp quit the race before the end of March.

The man elected president that year, George H.W. Bush, gave his former rival a Cabinet job as secretary of housing and urban development. It was a chance for Kemp to try out some of his ideas, such as "urban enterprise zones." Kemp stuck it out as a team player, but it was far from the role he had been preparing for all his life.

When the first Bush administration ended in 1993, Kemp headed for the private sector. The following year, he watched from the sidelines as one of his junior colleagues from his House days, Newt Gingrich, led a successful assault on Capitol Hill and became the first Republican speaker in 40 years.

In the summer and fall of 1996, Kemp had one last hurrah as the Republican candidate for vice president. He and top-of-the-ticket partner Bob Dole had never been close, and the strain showed at times during their losing campaign. Kemp had often said the one position he cared to play on a football team was quarterback, and it showed.

Kemp declined to mount another presidential bid of his own in 2000 and did not join the new Republican administration organized that year by the second President Bush. He had not been in the public eye often in recent years. His story always seemed unfinished, his potential unfulfilled.

So it was sad this weekend to learn of his death, to reflect on what he brought to the party and the Congress, and to mourn what has been lost since he left the national political stage. He embodied much of the spirit that lifted Reagan at his zenith, including Reagan's ability to make conservative economics appealing to the working class.

Kemp never figured out how to finesse the conflict between his party's economic and social agendas. He preferred to focus on the essentially egalitarian notion that any and all individuals should be allowed to go as far as their talent and work would take them. He was the original big-tent Republican, all about outreach and welcome, as eager to expand the party as he was to expand the economy.

He always had the sunny, eternally upbeat manner so many saw in Reagan in the White House. With Kemp's passing, those days suddenly seem distant indeed.