Various Republican senators and allied commentators have suggested that Judge Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina" statements are passive assertions of racial or ethnic bias. But there's a simpler explanation: Sotomayor may simply have been rallying female, Latino and African-American lawyers to her cause.

"I was trying to inspire," she told senators about the speeches, in which she sometimes pointed to herself as a model for breaking through barriers.

In her long climb up toward the Supreme Court, Sotomayor routinely tailored her stump speeches for each audience. For example, in 1998, when she took her seat on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, she pitched her speech at two very different audiences. For her supporters in the courtroom, she declared that "hundreds of lawyers, many of whom are in this room today, not only sent letters but called upon their personal contacts to assist in my confirmation process.... The outpouring of affection and support I received from the legal, women's and Hispanic communities in New York, Puerto Rico and nationally has been, quite frankly, overwhelming. Without this combined effort, this day would never have happened."

But for her judicial peers in the courtroom, she emphasized the example set by her hard-working mother. "To this day, I can remember how devoted she was to getting her [nursing] degree. My Mom was like no student I knew. She got home from school or work and literally immersed herself in her studies, working until midnight or beyond, only to get up again before all of us. She was a straight-A student who took the nursing test and passed all five parts on her very first try. With an example like that, none of you have to wonder why my brother and I had no choice but to do well in school."

By this year, with Barack Obama in the White House and her nomination imminent, she had dropped the "wise Latina" shtick, even at an April 17 event organized by the Black, Latino, Asian Pacific American Law Alumni Association at New York University. "On November 4, we saw past our ethnic, religious and gender differences.... Our [post-election] challenge is to give unselfishly and openly to the needy in our society, regardless of their gender or ethnic background."

She has also modified her language to match liberals' perspectives. In a 1994 speech, she described herself as a female "Hispanic," but subsequently dubbed herself a "Latina." This shift came in the 1990s as her ethnic-minority allies were dismissing "Hispanic" as too redolent of the Spanish settlers in Latin America. Instead, they championed "Latino" to emphasize the solidarity and interests of people in the United States whose ancestors came from Central America and the Caribbean islands.

By 2001, Sotomayor had retooled the speech to broaden her coalition to other ethnic-minority groups, such as African-Americans. This solidarity was demonstrated by her repeated citation of Harvard professor Martha Minow's broad anti-establishment claim that in law, "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives." If there's no objective stance to compare the performance of white male judges against ethnic-minority judges or female judges, then it's easy for new groups -- including Sotomayor and her allies -- to argue that their perspectives and qualifications are missing from the bench. Sotomayor's use of Minow's quotes was particularly tactful, if only because Minow rose up through the profession to become dean of Harvard Law School this month.

Republican senators are choosing to treat Sotomayor's various stump speeches as evidence of a very un-judicial demeanor. But maybe they should use a little empathy and treat her like any other politician out flattering supporters and making campaign promises.

"I gave a variant of my speech to a variety of different groups, most often to groups of women lawyers or to groups, most particularly, of young Latino lawyers and students," Sotomayor told Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., on Tuesday. "I was trying to inspire them to believe that their life experiences would enrich the legal system.... I was also trying to inspire them to believe that they could become anything they wanted to become, just as I had."