Ed, I think this is part of Judge Sotomayor’s bag of tricks. “Who really knows what liberal means?” is a deflection along the lines of “Who really knows what wise means?” It struck me reading both what you, Roger and Wendy have written at Bench Memos, and then finding this typically astute observation from Paul Mirengoff at Powerline (italics are mine):

By the mid 1990s, at the latest, Sotomayor was under the sway of feminist legal dogma. This is evident from a 1994 speech on “Women in the Judicary.” Here, in a preview of her more notorious 2001 “Wise Latina” address, Sotomayor takes on the view of Justice O’Connor and New York federal Judge Miriam Cedarbaum that men and women should not (and that good judges do not) rule based upon their own gender. As Wendy Long points out, Sotomayor argued that women make different and “better” decisions than men, better meaning “a more compassionate, and caring conclusion.”
Here, as in the “Wise Latina” speech, Sotomayor tosses around the views of the radical feminist law professor Martha Minnow, her law school classmate. In particular, she refers to Minnow’s rather sophomoric response to Justice O’Connor’s claim that a wise old female judge will reach the same conclusion as a wise old male judge — that there is no universal definition of “wise.”

Sophomoric, yes, but effective. You call me X and instead of debating the relative merits of X-thinking, I bat my epistemological eyes and say, “Oh, who really knows what X is anyway?” Naturally, my fellow X’ers know exactly what I mean (just as they know exactly what I mean when I chuckle and say “I’m not advocating” that appeals court judges make policy). But this technique avoids giving ground to my critics, and gives a comfort level to the undecideds who don’t want to suffer the media slings and arrows that would result from a “no” vote and are therefore delighted that I have avoided saying what I actually think.

I suspect we’re in for a lot of “it all depends on what the definition if is is.” Or maybe we should update and call it “rejecting the false choice between ‘yes’ and ‘no.’”