Sent: Friday, May 14, 2010 9:38 AM  Subject: A reason to smile.  This week, when the president first told me he’d chosen Elena Kagan to serve on the Supreme Court, I couldn’t help but smile. I met her 20 years ago, when she took a break from teaching school and chasing guys to join my staff in the Senate, and even back then, it was easy to picture her in a black robe.  Of course, Elena prefers to see herself in something frillier, because she’s a girl’s girl. Just try dragging her out of La Perla! And I’m sure, under those robes, she’ll be rocking some Juicy Couture jeans and Christian Louboutin suede boudoir slides. Uh-oh. Did I sound gay there for a minute? Well, I’m not. And neither is Elena Kagan.  She went to Harvard, not Smith. It’s Elena, not Ellen. She barely drives, much less a Subaru. She’s never been spotted at Home Depot or the Meow Mix bar. And she doesn’t have Ani DiFranco on her iPod.  I recall how upset she was a few years ago when she got muscled into playing softball by some friends. She hates the game, absolutely HATES it. She cried and cried — like a fragile, adorable little girl. She said the only thing worse was when she was forced to compete in the L.P.G.A. celebrity-lawyer classic.  She never watches the Rachel Maddow show. By 9 p.m., Elena’s usually snuggled up in bed in a lacy peach peignoir, scrawling “Mrs. George Clooney” in the margins of Blackstone’s Commentaries.  Don’t bother trying to get her out for dinner on a Monday night when “Dancing With the Stars” is on. Her heart belongs to Maksim Chmerkovskiy’s abs!  Ignore those wicked whispers about her sexual orientation. I cannot categorically assure you that she never flirted with another young woman when she was at Princeton. But I can categorically assure you that if she did, it would only have been to impress the cute guy in her Philosophy 101 seminar.  Elena dated some of Eliot Spitzer’s friends at Princeton because her real ambition was to be “The Good Wife.” But now she’s ready to settle for being The Supreme Justice.  Elena is anything but a history-making, barrier-breaking, proud, strong, happy gay woman. She’s a garden-variety, sad, scary, single, childless career woman who can’t get a man because she’s too smart, works too much and refuses to settle.  You may have trouble at first seeing the zesty legal powerhouse who described herself as “a famously excellent teacher” as a pathetic loser with men. But just check out the Ben Smith interview in Politico with Sarah Walzer, Elena’s roommate in a mouse- infested apartment while they were at Harvard Law.  Sarah says Elena was obsessed with all “the usual girl talk stuff” and that they conspired about how to get a guy’s attention, how to lure a guy to dinner, how to find a guy in a new city and how to avoid intimidating a man with your brains and confidence.  “It’s an ongoing challenge for very smart women,” Walzer said. “There are not very many men who would choose women who are smarter than they are.”  Yeah, there aren’t too many guys like Barack and me who don’t see it as a problem.  Elena is flat-out brilliant, but even she has lapses of jurisprudence. When she worked for me on Capitol Hill, she came up with a scheme to do a calendar of Senate studs.  The criticism that she has no paper trail is unfair. Check out Ms. Left’s prodigious paper trail looking for Mr. Right on Match.com.  Even Justice Thurgood Marshall had to chastise Elena once when she was clerking for him. “Shorty,” he told her, “you’ve got to stop leaving early for mani-pedis.”  Behind her brisk, no-nonsense exterior, Elena Kagan is a man-hungry babe from Manhattan like Carrie Bradshaw (and definitely not like Cynthia Nixon). She’s been talking for months about going to the first matinee of the new “Sex and the City” movie. Give that Cosmo girl a Cosmo and watch out!  One last thing I’d like to straighten out: Elena didn’t invite conservatives like Antonin Scalia to come visit at Harvard because she’s a conciliator. She just thinks Republican men are more dishy. When she made a courtesy call on Scott Brown the other day, she told him he was a hottie with a smokin’ little body. As our solicitor general, she’s had some notable tangles with Chief Justice John Roberts over briefs. But it’s just sexual tension.  Please give us your support to put this extraordinary — and extraordinarily straight — nominee in the judicial nunnery with Sonia:  Trust me — the only secret Elena has is Victoria’s.
A word from the vice president: Elena Kagan is not even a little bit gay. Not that thereâs anything wrong with that.