From the WSJ:
But Judge Alito may not bring nuclear winter to Washington. According to the terms of a compromise that prevented Senate Armageddon earlier this year, centrist Republicans vowed only to support Democratic filibusters of candidates they agreed were too extreme. Judge Alito may not quite fit that bill, and there may not even be enough Democratic support for a filibuster. A handful of Judge Alito's decisions could give centrist lawmakers comfort, including a 2000 ruling that a New Jersey partial-birth abortion ban was unconstitutional. As an appellate judge, he was simply following precedent in that case, which he would be free to reverse once on the high court. But he still may seem flexible enough to satisfy centrist Republicans, and he "will be grudgingly confirmable to many Democrats once they look at his record," according to Tom Goldstein, a partner at the Washington law firm Goldstein & Howe, who was possibly the first Supreme Court observer to predict the failure of the Miers nomination.
http://online.wsj.com/article/the_afternoon_report.html?mod=home_us_inside_today (subscription)