So why is she sounding the note of overcoming segregation and oppression when -- for whatever reason -- it affected not one bit her ability to be educated and achieve to the nth degree?
She knows that and we know that, but the reporter, who grew up in the same town as Dr. Rice, doesn't know that. She tries to get that point across to him in several instances throughout the article. Here are a couple of gems from the article. They point out all that is wrong with liberals and the Democrat party:
Rice herself voted for a Democrat in the first presidential election in which she was eligible, casting her ballot for Jimmy Carter in 1976. She voted for Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, largely out of distress with what she considered naive statements by Carter about the Soviet Union. In 1984 Hart's farsighted military reform agenda attracted her, although by then, Blacker says, it was clear to him, from joint appearances on arms control panels, that she was "more comfortable" in the Republican Party.
It was also clear to another Stanford colleague, Russia expert Michael McFaul, who remembers Rice telling him she opposed gun control and even gun registration because Bull Connor could have used it to disarm her father and others who patrolled Titusville in 1963. "For me as a liberal, pro-gun control person, it really hit me over the head," McFaul says. "I remember thinking, 'Who are we as white liberals to respond?' "
Rice says it was the issue of race that repelled her from the Democratic Party for good – for reasons that echo the lessons she draws from her family narrative. She remembers watching the 1984 Democratic National Convention that nominated Walter Mondale for president, and recoiling at what seemed to her an endless refrain of appeals to "women, minorities and the poor, which basically means helpless people and the poor."
"If I heard it one more time!" she says, still fuming. "I decided I'd rather be ignored than patronized."