Before clinching the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Barack Obama contrasted his vision for the future role of the U.S. Supreme Court to rival John McCain's, arguing that the current Court's consistent bias in favor of "the powerful against the powerless" has allowed corporate and government interests to ride roughshod over "what ordinary people are going through." In that populist vein, Obama went on to describe as his models for Supreme Court appointments Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter--who he claimed are "people on the bench who have enough empathy, enough feeling" for those trampled on by Corporate America. Once securely anointed in June, Obama immediately lost interest in ordinary people and began panting for corporate support. Perhaps for this reason, he felt no need to criticize the Court for its June 25 ruling on behalf of ExxonMobil that reduced to a mere pittance the amount in punitive damages that the most profitable corporation in history owes to the nearly 33,000 Alaskan fishermen, cannery workers and Natives whose livelihoods were destroyed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in corporate history.