It matters that the man President Bush called “the best man for the job on the merits” was unwilling or unable under the senators’ questioning to deviate an inch from his prepared talking points; that although he was a sitting federal appeals court judge (albeit for only 18 months) his knowledge of recent Supreme Court decisions was shaky at best; or that he made the implausible claim that he had never expressed a view, even in conversation, about Roe v. Wade, a precedent that he then voted, in dissent, to repudiate when the opportunity arose during his first year on the Supreme Court bench.

It matters that the man who is now the court’s senior associate justice, and who would turn the constitutional clock back to the 18th century if he ever found four colleagues to agree with him, distanced himself during his confirmation hearing from the extreme conservative views he had spent years espousing in speeches. Those were, he claimed, nothing more than the musings of a “part-time political theorist.” Pressed to explain his position that there was a “natural law” higher than the Constitution, he uttered perhaps the most candid line of the entire proceeding: “I certainly never thought I’d be having this discussion.”

And I’d like to think that people remember his remarkable description of the transformation he underwent when he became a judge and “shed the baggage of ideology.” It was an “amazing process,” he told the senators. “You want to be stripped down like a runner.”

In one way, Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court nominee is Clarence Thomas’s opposite. His conventional qualifications are not in doubt. (The American Bar Association committee that deemed him “well qualified,” the organization’s highest rating, had adjudged Clarence Thomas to be only “qualified,” with a minority of the members deeming him “unqualified.”) After a Supreme Court clerkship and 12 years on the federal appellate bench, he has an easy familiarity with the intricacies of the Supreme Court’s docket. His avoidance of direct questions about his substantive views was graceful to the point of tedium, and not a surprise to anyone.

So what should the public remember from the “real” Brett Kavanaugh hearing? Again, to be clear, I don’t mean to minimize the importance of the hearing scheduled for Thursday. My concern is that the vulnerabilities that have come to light in recent days — not only Dr. Blasey’s precise allegation of sexual assault but also tales of the nominee’s heavy drinking in high school and beyond, his disturbingly suggestive yearbook entry , and his buddy who could say a lot but who chooses not to talk — collectively have already started to drown out the vulnerabilities that should have made the nomination something other than the partisan glide path to confirmation that it was on when the first-round hearing ended.