<p>sewhappy, as I said above, Thomas was appointed at a very young age, and with no (or little) relevant prior experience, to a series of increasingly high-level jobs. The last, at age 40, was to be a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, at which point there was little doubt that President Bush considered him a possible Supreme Court appointment. As Chair of the EEOC, he was very high-profile and very controversial, mainly for his public opposition to most of what the agency was doing. He wasn’t considered a transformative leader, though – more a self-promotional ideologue who walled himself off from the agency he was supposed to be heading, and created a lot of chaos while scoring points off his subordinates. Other Reagan appointees had similar hostility to the historical direction of their agencies, but turned things around and did a bunch of things that they considered valid. I don’t think that was Thomas.</p>
<p>That’s why he was both high-profile and underqualified. He had been an unqualified Assistant Secretary at DOE for a short time, an underqualified Chair of the EEOC for a number of years, then an underqualified Court of Appeals judge for two years. Contrast that resume with the resumes of other recent Supreme Court appointees from either party, and you should notice the difference. He was younger, and had accomplished far less, than anyone else.</p>