What went wrong during the Roberts hearings? I watched (through the wonders of Tivo) just about every Democratic Senator question Roberts during the hearings. Not one of them, including Kennedy, Feinstein and Biden, ever made him squirm. And it's not because Roberts was somehow supremely unflappable. (Anyone who testifies is unflappable - even Bork and Thomas)
It's because the Senators did a poor job of questioning.
I'm not sure if advocacy groups believed that their own testimony after the Senate questioning of Roberts would make headlines, but the fact is there will no media coverage of the advocacy group testimony unless there's some moments of drama, some stinging questioning, caused by skillful Senators during the questioning of the nominee.
Kennedy seem flustered, Feinstein droned on (and was too respectful) and Biden was too long-winded. Specter was better than the three put together.
So why is this the advocacy groups fault?
Because in the current political world advocacy groups start the controversy against a nominee rolling. They do the backround work, find the controversy and run the intial ads against the nominee.
With Roberts this simply never happened effectively. The intial co-ordination and TV ads were weak and ineffective. Sure everyone on the liberal radio and blogging world snickered about what a bad guy he was, but one or two issues were never focused on. Even now you couldn't get a consistent answer from Roberts opponents as to why he should not be confirmed. Reasons vary and none of them sting: He was too vague in his answers: He made snide remarks about women's rights in administraction memos he wrote in the Reagan years; He doesn't support the right to privacy enough; He has too much a Republican insider background; We don't know enough about him because the administration did not release all the memos the committee wanted.
Certainly you can say these all add up to a reason to vote against him, but if your going to get a few Republican votes to defeat a candidate (or even make it uncomfortably close) there has to be some rallying points.
Bork had the privacy right issue and Thomas had Anita Hill. These were issues that advocacy groups successfully unearthed and created as controversies leading up to the hearings. Then, key Senators questioned the nominee on those issues repeatedly and created moments of drama. Later, the advocacy groups got to give impassioned testimony on these issues that made news.
The sniping now going on between advocacy groups and the "no" votes by Feingold and Leahy is a footnote to the failure to defeat Roberts. The advocacy groups and the Senators most opposed to him dropped the ball with Roberts.