When Geraldo Rivera heard today that Sonia Sotomayor was the Supreme Court nominee, he saw the light.
Literally.
The Fox News host was so excited about the high court’s first Hispanic nominee that he leapt from his chair in his home office and bopped his head on a low-hanging light fixture.
“This is as important to us as Obama was to the African American community. I have goosebumps,” says Rivera, 65, born to a Catholic, Puerto Rican father and Jewish mother. He defines himself as the former.
In an interview from his North Jersey home, Rivera says there’s only been a few times in his life he felt this pumped: When the Mets won their first World Series; when he passed his bar exam and when his kids were born. (He has five, ages 3 to 29.)
“It finally happened. Wow. Look how the Puerto Rican community came up with someone so world-class,” says Rivera of Sotomayor, 54, a federal Appeals Court judge in New York and the product of a South Bronx housing project.
The nomination of Sotomayer will help dispel, in Rivera’s view, “the whole poverty-pimp mentality that afflicts the Puerto Rican community in New York. Elected officials go around blaming ‘the man.’