Slide ListView with setX, setPadding, or tween animations?

Without going into details, I want to be able to "crawl" elements into ListView, similar to the "slide archive" function in GMail. I'm fine with onTouchListener, and all this, my question is about slide animation.

The first two things that come to mind are ...

view.setPadding(slideOffset, 0, 0, 0);

and..

view.setX(slideOffset);

The first is very oily, even on an emulator.
The latter twitches a bit on my Galaxy Nexus.

My questions:
* No matter what I tried, what is the right way to do this?
Why setXless smooth than setPadding?
Is one approach to Android best practices more than another?
Is there an animation cast with animation? If so, can you give a brief example to point me in the right direction?

Edit:
To be clear, I add an image of the effect I'm trying to emulate.