Attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee today in her first step on the path toward confirmation. The key question around this initial hearing was about President Obama’s executive amnesty, not anything controversial in Lynch’s past or expected to arise in the near future. Which is why Lynch should know from the outset that her nomination is in good shape.

Lynch is a highly confirmable nominee, even in these times of political polarization. For the left, her identity-politics credentials are impeccable: she’d be the first African-American woman to be attorney general. Far more interesting is her appeal to the right. Democrats have initiated an unusual sales job to convince enough Republicans to approve her nomination. Their case for her, at least with regard to conservatives, involves throwing Eric Holder under the bus before he can clean out his desk.

Lynch is the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York. She is regarded as a tough and fair prosecutor, charming and up-front. But perhaps the best example of the way Democrats are convincing Republicans of her virtues is this New York Times profile of her from January 12. It begins with a story:

While interviewing aspiring prosecutors for jobs in the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, Loretta E. Lynch, an African-American Democrat who grew up in the segregated South, often poses a favorite question.

You are investigating a violent crime in a minority neighborhood. The crucial witness, a kindhearted grandmother, will not testify. The case hangs in the balance. What do you do?

Many applicants think they know the answer she wants. They offer thoughts on the challenges of policing troubled neighborhoods and the need for sensitivity to the concerns of witnesses. But in a soft voice bearing hints of North Carolina, Ms. Lynch tells them they are wrong.

“Nana’s going to jail,” she says.

What’s the upshot of this story? That Lynch is no hostage to racial grievance politics. That her pursuit is justice, not postmodern “fairness” or empathy before the law. That to her, the rule of law comes before political correctness or partisan accounting. She is, in other words, everything that Eric Holder is not:

Ms. Lynch, President Obama’s nominee to become the next attorney general, is easy to misread. Mr. Obama predicted that she would carry on the legacy of Eric H. Holder Jr., an African-American who proudly declared himself an activist and became the administration’s most outspoken voice on race.

But while Ms. Lynch shares Mr. Holder’s views on issues such as the strained relations between the police and minorities, her friends and colleagues describe someone cautious and comfortable staying in the background who sees her role as that of a traditional prosecutor and not a civil rights advocate. …

There is no doubt that Ms. Lynch is sensitive to issues of race and criminal justice, said Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard law professor, an old friend and one of the “triplets” at Cahill. But “she’s not an ideologue,” Ms. Gordon-Reed said. “She’s not going to do things to please some wing. She’s not a caricature of anything. She is a prosecutor.”

This is yet another installment of a game the media plays that sometimes rankles conservatives. It might be called, “Now it can be told.” It plays out like this: conservatives level an entirely accurate accusation at a liberal political figure; liberals respond that they are simply shocked at the level of incivility conservatives are inserting into our politics; when it becomes convenient later on, liberals tacitly acknowledge that, yes, conservatives were right all along, as they so often are.

Eric Holder was a terrible attorney general. But much of that was because he saw himself as a partisan actor. All attorneys general get accused these days of “politicizing justice,” so it doesn’t advance the argument much to claim that Holder was a special kind of toxic stooge. Though that’s pretty obviously true.

When Holder officially leaves his post, there will be numerous columns from the right-of-center press detailing his many, many failings as attorney general. This isn’t that column. Instead, I think it’s far more interesting to note the extent to which the left praises Lynch as the un-Holder.

The Times even does a kind of meta version of this today, writing that “Her allies have sought to differentiate her from Mr. Holder, an outspoken liberal voice in the administration who clashed frequently with Republicans who accused him of politicizing the office,” in an article that seeks itself to do precisely that, from a newspaper that has been the leading clearinghouse of such Lynch-Holder differentiation.

Eric Holder couldn’t get confirmed today, because he turned out to be precisely the kind of attorney general who believes in selective justice, personal vendettas, and self-righteous crusades that turn the country against itself. Of course, that’s the attorney general the left wanted, so they couldn’t be too honest with the country until he was confirmed.

But now there’s a serious, ethical, lawful, responsible nominee who just wants to do her job. And that is an entirely different kind of nominee from Eric Holder. So now it can be told–now, in fact, it must be told.