Supremely Girly Girl

Supremely Girly Girl 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.