About That "Compelling Personal Story"

The AP goes where few in the media dare to tread as they shed some light on Sonia Sotomayor's "compelling personal story":

In speeches, Sotomayor has harkened back to her and her brother's beginnings in a poor Bronx neighborhood, roots that President Barack Obama highlighted in introducing her this week.

"Born in the South Bronx, she was raised in a housing project," Obama said. "And even as she has accomplished so much in her life, she has never forgotten where she began, never lost touch with the community that supported her."

Yet Sotomayor did not live her entire childhood in a housing project in the South Bronx—she spent most of her teenage years in a middle-class neighborhood, attending private school and winning scholarships to Princeton and then Yale.

And Sotomayor's life and lifestyle after law school largely resemble the background of many lawyers who rise to powerful positions in Washington.

She climbed her way up through New York's Democratic power structure boosted by its ultimate brokers over those years—Gov. Mario Cuomo, Mayor Ed Koch, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. That's the access of a partner in a corporate law firm, not a kid from the South Bronx.

She now earns more than $200,000 a year and owns a condominium in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood of million-dollar-plus homes. Her brother, Dr. Juan Sotomayor, is a physician in North Syracuse, N.Y., whose practice doesn't accept Medicaid or Medicare—programs for the poor and elderly—according to its Web site.

Obama has tried hard to get us all to think only of her story and not about her views. While her story is a great rags-to-riches all-American story, it's not her days in the projects that will be important when decisions are made. It what she thinks now.