Kaus expects nothing less than a full-blown conservosphere freak-out over this. I’m underwhelmed.

After his public conference call with Clinton supporters (covered extensively by Jonathan Martin) Saturday, John McCain met privately with some 75 of those supporters at his Virginia headquarters, two people who were there said…

“He stayed for a good almost half hour afterwards shaking hands, listening to our concerns, talking to us,” said [Party Unity My Ass] founder Will Bower, who said he thought many of the people there would vote for McCain…

Bower said he’d liked McCain’s answer on judges, in which he “pointed out that he supported Bill Clinton with both Ginsberg [sic] and Breyer.”

What’s he supposed to say? He was there to woo liberals. The best he could do realistically when they asked him about judges was to point to the Gang of 14 and emphasize that he wasn’t an obstructionist when the left’s turn came to pack the Court. Which, incidentally, would be an odd thing for the right to fault him for at this point: After years of Democratic shrieking about Bush’s appointments, my sense is most conservatives believe the senate’s advice and consent should be limited to determining whether the nominee has the legal chops to do the job plus some cursory ideological vetting to make sure there’s no truly fringe kookiness anywhere in his/her closet. If the left had followed McCain’s example, Miguel Estrada would be five years into his tenure on the D.C. Circuit.

Besides, unlike immigration, this clearly isn’t a subject on which Maverick is as far left as Obama — although given the composition of the senate next year, the difference between a McCain appointee and an Obama appointee is likely to be the difference between, say, an O’Connor and a Ginsburg. The former’s better than the latter, but if you think you’re getting another Roberts or Alito under any circumstances, think again.