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The Democratic Senators on the Judiciary are no match for John Roberts: he could be the most conservative jurist in U.S. history and they still wouldn't be able to prove he was an extremist. Roberts has spent his entire life preparing for this moment: he is amazingly intelligent and patient, and he will have no difficulty outmanuvering the idiots that call themselves Senators.
There are certainly degrees of originalism. My prediction of John Roberts is that he will turn out somewhat to the right of O'Connor and Kennedy, but perhaps a hair to the left of Rehnquist. A degree of respect for the Constitution as a document is important for any Justice, simply because of the overwhelming importance of rule of law: a court must not be permitted to interpret the Constitution in just any way they see fit. Rather, a fine balance must be struck between legislating from the bench whilst ignoring the Constitution, and binding oneself to an 18th-century interpretation of an 18th-century document. From my view, Rehnquist struck the best balance in this regard, although he sometimes tended to rely to heavily on an originalist reading.
John Roberts, it seems, understands the importance of allowing judicial understanding of the Constitution to change over time. However, as a conservative, he presumably also understands that we have a Constitution for a reason. I hope that he sees the attraction of slow, gradual change to Constitutional interpretation.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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