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http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=2012
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11/17/2004 @ 10:17am

A Politician, Not a Diplomat
by John Nichols

   Two weeks before the 2004 presidential election, the Bush
   administration's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, made a
   solemn pronouncement about her desire to remain outside the political
   fight between Democrat John Kerry and the man who this week appointed
   her to serve as Secretary of State. "I think it's important that we
   not campaign," Rice said of national security aides. She emphasized
   that this was a particular concern because "we are in a time of war."

   Rice made her comments during an interview with the political editor
   of KDKA, a Pittsburgh-based television powerhouse with a reach
   capable of taking her words into the homes of millions of voters in
   the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

   Then, in a display of her nonpolitical approach, Rice proceeded to
   rip into Kerry's charge that the administration had botched the
   search for Osama bin Laden. Kerry's assertion "is just not true,"
   raged Rice, before again refuting the notion that she was
   campaigning for Bush.

   The next day, she flew to Cleveland, Ohio, the largest city in the
   most hotly contested of all the battleground states and trashed Kerry
   once more.

   Two days later, she was in south Florida, one of the most hotly
   contested regions of another battleground state where again she
   dumped on Kerry's strategies for defending the United States before
   declaring, "The global war on terror calls us, as President Bush
   immediately understood, to marshall all the elements of our national
   power to beat terror and the ideology of hatred that protects
   (terrorists) and recruits others to their ranks."

   During the months of September and October of 2001, Rice made no
   public appearances outside Washington, during September and October
   of 2002, she made one New York appearance, during September and
   October of 2003, she appeared in New York and Chicago. But as the
   November 2 election approached, Rice suddenly discovered the joys of
   Pittsburgh and Detroit. With the man who she once mistakenly referred
   to as "my husband" locked in a tough reelection campaign, Rice
   appeared during the fall of 2004 at least one time each in the
   battleground states of Oregon, Washington, North Carolina, Michigan
   and Florida, and at least twice in the battleground states of
   Pennsylvania and Ohio.

   Rice's travels were, for the most part, paid for by the taxpayers.
   And her aides insisted throughout the campaign season that, in the
   words of James Wilkinson, a deputy national security advisor, "Dr.
   Rice has continued the nonpolitical tradition of her post."

   That pronouncement was so laughable, however, that the Washington
   Post, which did the ablest job of tracking Rice's travels in the
   months prior to the election, observed, "The frequency and location
   of her speeches differ sharply from those before this election year
   -- and appear to break with the long- standing precedent that the
   national security adviser try to avoid overt involvement in the
   presidential campaign. Her predecessors generally restricted
   themselves to an occasional speech, often in Washington, but (by
   late October) Rice will have made nine outside Washington since
   Labor Day."

   The woman who claimed she could not appear before the bipartisan
   committee investigating the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington
   because it would break precedents set by past national security
   advisers had no qualms about breaking past precedents when it came to
   using her position to advance her favorite politician's interests.
   "I'm afraid this represents, at least in my book, excessive
   politicization of an office which is unusually sensitive," Zbigniew
   Brzezinski, the Carter administration's national security, said of
   Rice's pre- election travels. Brzezinski confirmed the Post's
   observation that past national security advisers had "viewed the job
   as not a highly political one."

   Obviously, Rice had a different view. Her political campaigning was
   so blatant and so extensive that the ranking Democrat on the House
   Judiciary Committee, U.S. Representative John Conyers, D-Michigan,
   sought a special counsel investigation of whether Rice had violated
   the Hatch Act's provisions against campaigning by federal employees
   who are on the job. "(Any) political activity on the part of the
   national security adviser would undermine the trust bestowed on
   such a non-partisan post," argued Conyers in a letter requesting
   the inquiry.

   Of course, there was never any question that Rice was engaging in
   political activity. The only question was: For who? To be sure, her
   busy schedule in the battleground states -- which supplemented
   speeches with high-profile interviews with local television stations
   and newspapers -- helped Bush. But it also helped Rice.

   After Rice appeared in that city in September, the Seattle Times
   newspaper pointed out that, "Rice sounded at times like a candidate."
   In a sense, she was. Prior to the election, Washington was abuzz with
   speculation about the all-but-certain departure of Secretary of State
   Colin Powell, the closest thing the administration had to an
   independent man of government -- as opposed to the programmed
   politicos who peopled most major posts in the Bush White House. Rice,
   who began campaigning for the Secretary of State post before the 2000
   election, did not want there to be any doubt on the part of Bush or
   Vice President Dick Cheney, the man who runs foreign policy for the
   administration, that she would be a more loyal and dramatically more
   politicized player than Powell.

   And so she shall be.

   Rice, whose many excuses for refusing to appear before the 9/11
   Commission included a claim that she was too wrapped up in the
   serious work of analyzing potential threats to the nation, has
   always been able to find time for political work on behalf of the
   Bush-Cheney team -- and on behalf of her own ambition. In March, at
   the same time that she was stonewalling the 9/11 Commission, Rice
   found time to deliver an extended briefing to top executives from
   television networks, magazines, newspapers and other media
   properties owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. conglomerate. Even
   as Spain's new prime minister was talking about withdrawing his
   country's troops from Iraq, and Poland's president was suggesting
   that he might do the same, Rice blocked out time to speak via
   satellite to the Murdoch lieutenants gathered at the posh
   Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Cancun, Mexico.

   Certainly, her appearance helped to cement the relationship between
   the Bush administration and Murdoch's media empire, which includes
   the Fox broadcast and cable networks, the relentlessly pro-Bush New
   York Post and the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine. But it
   also helped to position Rice as a Bush administration player who,
   unlike Colin Powell, recognized the need to care for friendly media.

   Where Bush, Cheney and the neoconservative readers and advisers who
   have populated key positions inside the administration and at its
   edges never trusted Powell, they know they can count on Rice. Just as
   she politicized the national security adviser to an extent never
   before seen, she will politicize the State Department. Any pretense
   of independence or pragmatism will be discarded as quickly as was the
   tradition of keeping the national security adviser out of politics.

   With Powell, its feeble defender, on the way out of the State
   Department, the last small voices of dissent within the foreign
   policy bureaucracy will begin to fall silent. If Rice is confirmed,
   as seems certain considering the partisan divide in the Senate, the
   Department of State where Thomas Jefferson, William Jennings Bryan
   and George Marshall once presided, will be little more than an arm of
   the White House political operation. And the Secretary of State, who
   has already proven herself to be more interested in campaigning than
   in defending the best interests of the nation or its security, will
   not be a diplomat. She will be a politician, nothing more and,
   certainly, nothing less.

   *****************************************************************

   John Nichols' book on Cheney, Dick: The Man Who Is President, has
   just been released by The New Press. Former White House counsel John
   Dean, the author of Worse Than Watergate, says, "This page-turner
   closes the case: Cheney is our de facto president." Arianna
   Huffington, the author of Fanatics and Fools, calls Dick, "The first
   full portrait of The Most Powerful Number Two in History, a scary and
   appalling picture. Cheney is revealed as the poster child for crony
   capitalism (think Halliburton's no bid, cost-plus Iraq contracts) and
   crony democracy (think Scalia and duck-hunting)."

   Dick: The Man Who Is President is available from independent
         bookstores nationwide and by clicking here
   .

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