Charles Babington purports to know that John Roberts’ demeanor is “deliberately bland” in a Washington Post news story yesterday:

Given Roberts’s deliberately bland demeanor, some of the more entertaining or dramatic moments [in his confirmation hearings] could come from the mercurial chairman [Arlen Specter], who combines an incisive legal mind with an almost puckish pleasure in annoying and surprising the political left and right.

Surely blandness is in Roberts’ strategic interest, but that doesn’t mean that he is “deliberately” bland — we can’t know that to be true unless Roberts confesses as much. Maybe he’s just boring!