Look out, kids–Vice President Rice is coming!  So says Nicholas von Hoffman, outlining the supposedly formidable features of Rice as a running mate.  Now I understand why Sullivan named an uncomplimentary award after him.  Wow.  Granted, we all make bad predictions (I make more than my share), but this one doesn’t pass the laugh test.  It’s so ridiculous that I have to assume that it’s an elaborate joke, since everyone knows that Rice is politically radioactive to much of the population and to important constituencies within the Republican Party.  It reminds me of suggestions that Tommy Franks should be considered as a running mate–it’s not going to happen, or if it did somehow occur it would be a disaster.  

Given that Scowcroft is an advisor to McCain, you could imagine how McCain might be hearing about Rice’s virtues, but then Scowcroft has been baffled by what happened to his protege once she entered the Bush administration and probably isn’t angling for her to become Vice President.  The priorities she pursued in the first term as NSA and then early in the second term at State have horrified the realists (and sane people everywhere), while her belated push for Israel-Palestine negotiations and other evidence of a more realist-oriented foreign policy in recent years have horrified and scandalised the hard-liners.  The point is that she has no natural constituency within the party, and so no power base, and her record as NSA is so spectacularly bad that it would allow the Democrats to fight the election over the mistakes made in the early years of the occupation, reminding the country of the massive incompetence of this administration.  It directly links the ‘08 ticket to the old administration and makes it even harder for McCain to dissociate himself from Bush’s mistakes, and contrary to the analysis in the article it reassures nobody.  On the contrary it says that Bush loyalism will be rewarded, and that personal connections to the President count for more in advancing yourself in today’s Republican Party than any actual accomplishments in your career.  It would be an awesome endorsement of the cronyism at the heart of the Bush administration.  I can see why Democrats would want a Rice VP pick, since it would help them immensely, but it makes absolutely no sense for McCain to do this.  McCain is crazy, but he isn’t that out of it.  

This part was really too much:

They can attack Hillary’s experience claims as consisting of her being Bill’s wife. They can challenge her boast that she is a strong, independent woman and paint her as a weak, hopelessly-in-love woman under the spell of a man subject not only to “bimbo eruptions” but also eruptions of smarmy deals with shady business figures.

Right, and they will do that by nominating a Vice President whose career has depended lately on her personal relationship with the President and whose experience consists of being the President’s confidante/wife wannabe, and someone who is hopelessly under the spell of a man who led her to endorse one of the worst foreign policy agendas of modern times. 

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