Why?
Posted on April 7th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is actively courting the vice presidential nomination, Republican strategist Dan Senor said.
“Condi Rice has been actively, actually in recent weeks, campaigning for this,” Senor said this morning on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
According to Senor, Rice has been cozying up to the Republican elite. ~Political Radar
Steve Clemons was one of the first to pick up on Secretary Rice’s political maneuverings, and I was one of the first, at least this year, to ridicule the idea of a Condi Rice selection for the VP slot. Here Philip Klein and I are in complete agreement for a change. It seems like a terrible choice to make, but I suppose Secretary Rice wouldn’t be where she is today if it weren’t for a series of terrible choices to promote her to higher and higher levels within the government. One barrier to another promotion is that voters will get to have a say in whether or not she gets the job.
Then again, I have some relatives who would be over the moon at the prospect of a McCain/Rice ticket (they like McCain, but they love Condi–it’s weird). Maybe this is one of those cases where all the people who know a lot about a public official fail to see the attractiveness of the candidate to low-information voters. These voters probably don’t know that Rice was the worst NSA since the position was created or that U.S.-Russian relations have deteriorated to their worst post-Cold War low during her tenure at State. Maybe they heard some gushing commentary about her fashion sense and her piano-playing, and that’s all they need to know. Nonetheless, if McCain doesn’t want to blow his chance at winning the election he will not select her.
P.S. Bonus trivia question: who was the last appointed Cabinet member to be named to a presidential ticket?
Update: For whatever it’s worth, McCain heaped praise on Rice when he was asked about this report. May I also add that the blatantly tokenist argument advanced in support of selecting Secretary Rice is another reason why McCain shouldn’t pick her. Plus, it seems as if her public denials of any interest in the job are genuine. On the other hand, her fav ratings are very positive, which suggests that most people haven’t paid very close attention to what she has actually done. The notable thing about the numbers is that her favourability hasn’t changed significantly over the last three years. Among Republicans, 77% view her positively, as do 54% of independents. This is inexplicable to me, but there it is.
Ambinder says that there is currently no interest in the McCain camp for including her on the short list.
Filed under: politics
I wrote something about this. An excerpt:
Consider her record. She failed after 9/11 to be a voice of reason, refusing to defend racial profiling of Middle Easterners and distinguishing this from the Jim Crow policies of America’s past. She failed as National Security Advisor to take Bush aside and pull him off the rails by saying, “If we’re to pursue this ambitious course, we need many more troops regardless of what Rumsfeld is saying.” In works like Fiasco and Cobra II, she appears to have done very little in her role at the NSA, being bulldozed and parried by aggressive folks like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith. Since becoming Secretary of State, she has been tone deaf in our dealings with Serbia, Russia, Israel, China, and many other parties, the worst example of the “ugly American” we’ve ever seen in this role.
Worst of all, when she is not insulting foreigners, she insults America and its past with half-educated bromides, usually dealing with slavery and discrimination. Her habitual appeal to these examples show that she is far too traumatized and alienated by her youth in Alabama to be entrusted with stewardship over the country as a whole. The United States is still a white majority country where most of its people see much to admire in our history. Most of us, particularly on the Republican side, view the Founding as a glorious chapter in our history, the exact opposite of a “birth defect.”
Dufuses’,
It’s because she’s BLACK. That’s why she was at the top of the NSA, that’s why she was G.W. Bush’s foreign policy advisor, and that’s why she’s Secretary of State right now. There just weren’t that many black women who could speak Russian in the 1980’s, and since she did she got a huge career boost. The Republican Party must have color and Ms. Rice provides that (along with being a very non-controversial figure).
Eunomia is one of the most intelligent blogs I’ve discovered of late… via Reihan at Andrew Sullivan (when he guest’d blogged). I applaud you for that… but intellectuals sometimes are too smart and just don’t get that life is often horribly ironic and simple.
Obama’s surrogates (Moveon.org and Kos, etc.) are going to turn the general election into a race that pits racists versus non-racists. Despite Condi’s imperfections as a foreign policy guru, she might help to blunt a race/culture war in the general election and turn it into a policy debate. With Obama having no record whatsoever of accomplishing anything in his political and professional life, he stands to get hammered by a septogenarian who has a life full of accomplishments.
Condi has risen past her Peter Principle level of incompetence. She seems nice enough and can snarl back when she needs to, but she’s likely to as much a success as VP as Henry Wallace, former Sec. of Agriculture, was in 1941.
A minor quibble with Mr. Roach: unless I’m sadly mistaken, the Ugly American was actually a good guy who understood and sympathized with the locals. The term, like so many others, has been stood on its head.