Even Newt Gingrich has now backed off calling her a racist.
That's because the Republicans (including Gingrich) were successful in humiliating her in public before millions of people, which was really what the Republican version of the senate confirmation hearing was all about. Examine many of the comments and questions that were directed to her and see if you come away with any other conclusion.
There's a great article in the July 17th issue of "Nation" entitled "Sotomayor and the Politics of Public Humiliation," which points this GOP strategy out in rather plain language. Sotomayor was repeatedly interrupted, subjected to hostile and erroneous mischaracterizations of her and her record, accused of being a racist, and to add injury to insult, they intentionally mispronounced her name.
Apparently they were trying to push her over the edge and make her to go on the offensive so they could say she was also an over-emotional hot-bloodied radical Hispanic female judge. It didn't work. She did not have a "complete meltdown" as hoped for by the drawling simpering Lindsey Graham and the other race-baiting women haters whose job it was to humiliate and shame someone they see as a liberal female judge.
To quote the Nation article, "Women, and most especially black and brown women, have to prove their fitness for public life by demonstrating the ability to endure harsh brutality without openly fighting back." It's the age old art of public degradation.
From the Nation 7-17-09: "The Republican attacks on Sotomayor were not meant to derail her nomination. They were meant to degrade and humiliate as a warning if you attempt to assert your equality within a system still dominated by white male racial privilege you may get a place at the table, but not without public punishment."
Compare Sotomayor's calm, thoughtful, and intelligent reaction to her grand GOP inquisitors to how Clarence Thomas responded to his accusers. What was it Thomas cried? "A high-tech lynching.." The poor mistreated black man done in by "...left wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony..."
And didn't he once try and compare his cross examination by Joe Biden as being the equivalent of the Klu Klux Klan's assassination of Medger Evers? Then years later there he was again hawking his book on "60 Minutes" and whining some more about his shameful Affirmative Action Law Degree he got from all those sympathetic whities up at Yale Law School. I thought Sotomayor showed character and an admirable amount of wisdom and patience under pressure by not pulling a Clarence Thomas.