Posted on 07/26/2006 4:23:45 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
It has always mystified me that Condoleezza Rice is a Republican. She's black, she's a woman, she's smart. (OK, I hear all you Republicans snorting and getting ready to e-mail. I will grudgingly allow there are other bright right-wingers -- but few black women Republicans, and who would sign up after the disasterous Bush White House response to Hurricane Katrina?)
It seems so counterintuitive that Rice, a woman raised in the racially charged atmosphere of Birmingham, Ala., in the 1950s, who knew two of the girls who were killed in the church bombing there in 1963, who had to overcome latent prejudice in academia, both as a woman and as an African American, should be a parrot for George W. Bush, a man so out of touch. What has she been smoking?
In fact, Rice was a bona fide Democrat until 1980, when she had an epiphany after overhearing a remark by President Jimmy Carter. He said he was shocked by the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. Rice, a scholar of Russian politics, was "shocked that anybody would be shocked by that," explained Nicholas Lemann in a profile of Rice for the New Yorker. Two years later she flipped to the GOP.
In some ways, Rice had always been a conservative, Lemann reported, untouched by the militancy of the '60s, including the civil rights movement; an only child who never rebelled; a woman who applied for post-graduate work at Stanford University on stationery that had her name embossed in gold across the top.
But as the saying goes, it's never too late to change. Or, in Rice's case, revert.
The Democrats could use Condi in the next election as a presidential candidate. Think about it: The Bushes got their hands on Rice when she was young and impressionable. She worked for Bush senior and got to know him well before she signed up with Dubya. It is hard sometimes to believe, when one hears her at press conferences or listens to her speeches, that she is saying what she believes, but rather that she is elegantly explaining -- since he can barely do it himself -- President Bush's positions.
"He's actually influencing her," notes Lemann, "and she seems to be performing for him the immensely useful service of transforming shorthand impulses into developed stated policy. When you hear Rice speaking, that's what Bush would sound like if he were as articulate as Rice is."
So what the Dems need to do is figure out how George capitivated her and impress upon her the error of her ways. I would love to see a woman in the White House next time, but I don't think Hillary Clinton is going to make it; her heart is in the right place, but she is too divisive and her recent speech at the Economic Club of Chicago made me want to put my head down on the table and have a long nap.
Hillary does not have the rhetorical flourishes to impassion those around her.
And, Rice -- if only she could be loosened from the Bush grasp and reprogrammed to become less aloof -- would make a dandy Democratic candidate. She could even go on the David Letterman show, a la Bill Clinton and his saxophone, and play the piano.
So this is my advice to the Democrats. Recruit Rice, develop some kind of solid program we bleeding heart liberals could embrace and then, get back into the White House! Got that?
mailto:jhunter@suntimes.com
Apparently Jennifer does not know that Karl Rove brainwashed Condi.
Hooboy
How do you respond yo this kind of claptrap?
Jennifer, my dear, Condi got to where she is in life precisely by rejecting your liberal thinking.
Get back ovah heah! You ungrateful darky!
Article is too stupid to even waste time responding to.
Looks like a femnazi writer all the way.
Is it possible that Condi is a Republican because early on she realized if she focused her efforts on her own goals and objectives she would have a better chance of getting them than waiting for someone from the Government to achieve them for her? Many are still waiting.
" . . . who would sign up after the disasterous Bush White House response to Hurricane Katrina?"
I still haven't figured out what Bush did WRONG after Katrina.
Actually she looks like the twin sister of the one who advised Gore to wear "earth-tones" in 2000..I forget her name
What's important about the piece is that it indicated a lot of nervousness among Dems about Hillary's chances..
What a bigot! I really had to check to make sure this was not from the Onion.
Sorry, Jennifer, but Ms. Rice does not want to live on your plantation. And you are too ignorant to know this, but the Republican Party was founded on opposition to slavery.
In an article full of racist, demeaning remarks, this one takes the cake.
He was still the President. It just irks 'them' to no end.
breathtaking! The author already acknowleged that Rice knew two of the children killed in the church bombing; considers 'rebellion' to be a value in itself; and then is deliberatly misleading about the "name embossed in gold"...Rice's father was a minister, was he not? This makes it sound like she came from great wealth. And then she's Bush's parrot but his ELOQUENT parrot! lol. Gee, almost as if ...as if...Bush foreign policy makes sense! or something but that's absurd to even contemplate!
What a stupid paragraph.
The diversity in the President's cabinet and appointments show that he is the least "prejudiced" President we have had to date.
I still haven't figured out what Bush did WRONG after Katrina.
**
Only one thing, IMO: He let everyone bad mouth the administration when the blame should have gone, primarily, to Nagin and, secondly, to Blanco.
exactly
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