Article: Another Lesson in Confirmation Pitfalls; White House Had No Second Thoughts and No Second Candidate

Lani Guinier never had any real competition for the job.

As President Clinton's advisers sketched in names for top posts at the Justice Department earlier this year, Guinier looked like the perfect candidate to head the civil rights division: a black woman who was a career civil rights lawyer, a veteran of the department.

And - not least in the thinking of White House aides - she was a friend of the Clintons', two lawyers who stocked the Justice Department with a number of their friends.

There were some rumblings that Guinier's academic writings on voting rights might be viewed as radical, but White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum discounted them and did not read her law review

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