Do you have the self-confidence to pass Justice Roberts' Doughnut Test? Plus a (mercifully) unique slant on the Massa mess

Mmm, how yummy! And how gooey!

"I like people with a fair amount of self-confidence, who are going to be comfortable with expressing their views and defending those views without, you know, wilting."

-- Chief Justice John Roberts, at the U. of Alabama

by Ken

At first this story sounds not only interesting but surprising from our one and only chief justice. It suggests more awareness of individual character than I might have expected from someone whose life and judicial views (insofar as we have come to know them in this short but profoundly disturbing time) seem to reflect a fanatical commitment to rigid social orthodoxy and a worship (for want of a stronger term) of power and powerful people.

The story, which our pal Al Kamen passes along in today's WaPo "In the Loop" column with a hat tip to colleague Bob Barnes, is one that the chief told at the same confab with U. of A. law students which produced his much-ballyhooed pronouncement on the State of the Union address.

He developed a little self-confidence experiment once, he said, apparently when he was still an appellate judge. All the interviews were on one day, so he brought in a dozen powdered-sugar and glazed Krispy Kremes, and instructed his secretary to tell the applicants to help themselves.

"I figured anybody who had enough self-confidence to pick up a doughnut that's glazed or with powdered sugar would be the sort of person I was interested in," Roberts said. "I even remember saying, 'Anybody who has a doughnut, I'll hire.'"

Alas, at the end of the day, the doughnuts were untouched. "So I had to go back and look at their résumés," he said.

That our John is someone who values people who are "comfortable with expressing their views and defending those views without, you know, wilting" is not something I would necessarily have expected of him. However, as I think about it --

(1) It would be interesting to know just how much dissent Justice Roberts actually encourages, or even tolerates, and how he handles views that are fundamentally at odds with his own. My guess is that, given the degree to which his mind is already made up on all the things he believes in, the kinds of "views" he wants defended are varying opinions on legal technicalities. I can't help thinking that any real diversity of opinion is safely and reliably screened out by interview methods much more basic than the Doughnut Test. But again, I don't know what sorts of clerks he hires -- I'd be genuinely interested in knowing, and knowing also what the actual give-and-take among them is like.

(2) Even as a test of self-confidence, is the Doughnut Test really an absolutely reliable predictor? This sounds to me more like a sociological experiment having to do with people's response to stress (is there a much more stressful situation than a job interview with an appellate court judge?), or perhaps the dynamics of power. Did it never occur to the Doughnut Judge that to those young supplicants passing through his grinder he was the Man Who Controls the Doughnuts and My Future? The kind of candidate who would blithely munch on one of his prospective employer's doughnuts seems to me likely to be hiding a streak of sociopathy.

(I was puzzled for a while by that business of our John saying that he'd hire anybody who took a doughnut. What interviewee then would possibly not take one? Then I realized he meant that he remembers saying this to himself. Isn't it a little curious that even in casual conversation he so easily blurs the concepts of "saying" and "saying to oneself"?

(3) Powdered-sugar and glazed doughnuts??? Is this guy for frickin' real? I would ask if he's ever eaten one of either, except that he seems to have been at pains to make clear that they're favored treats of his.

It is humanly impossible to eat a powdered-sugar doughnut without having the powder distribute all over your person, and everything within roughly a three-foot radius, and a glazed doughnut impermeably coats every surface, including body parts and clothing, it comes in contact with. What if, say, you're asked to produce a clip you've brought to the interview, or the judge hands you a document to look at? How are you supposed to manage that with honey-glazed fingers? As if the interview situation wasn't stressful enough, are you really going to voluntarily add to it the menace of powdered sugar or doughnut glaze? That requires not confidence, but foolhardiness, or perhaps simple obliviousness.

(I have to wonder whether Justice Roberts isn't accustomed to having servants at the ready to mini-vac up the powder and to wet-nap the finger glaze.)

(4) I wonder whether the chief isn't perhaps confusing "self-confidence" with narrow-minded doggedness, a habit of thought with which he seems intimately familiar, though perhaps he calls it something else, like "steadfastness of purpose." Yes, it's important to be able to defend one's own views, but it may be more important to be able to hear other people's. I'm not sure that there's a Doughnut Test for this.


QUOTE OF THE DAY: THE ERIC MASSA MESS

"I think the country’s new obsession with Representative Massa is a very positive development.”

-- Tiger Woods, according to today's Borowitz Report

Andy B further reports: "The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the number of Americans making cheap jokes about Representative Massa rose to 48.5 million this week." That survey would presumably have been done before Andy added his really 
cheap jokes to the pile. (The above is the good one. If you're not inclined to check out the link for the others, the head, "Colleagues Praise Massa for Reaching Around the Aisle," should give you a clue.

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