[Mb-civic] Rice, the (Un)Candidate - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Rice, the (Un)Candidate

By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Friday, March 17, 2006; A19

She jets constantly around the world, from crisis to catastrophe, and 
when she's soaring 42,000 feet above some ocean she can't hear all the 
noise back home. That's probably just as well. "Run, Condi, run" 
wouldn't offend her ears, but I doubt she'd appreciate Spike Lee's 
advice: "Condi, stop smoking that crack!"

I wouldn't bet the mortgage that Condoleezza Rice will run for president 
this time. She says she doesn't want to, and although she leaves the 
door slightly ajar -- she doesn't say she absolutely, positively won't 
be a candidate -- that's probably just a prudent way of keeping her 
options open.

Even if she secretly does want to run, I think she'd have to be smoking 
something to believe all those Republicans who've been telling pollsters 
how peachy it would be to have a black woman at the head of their 
presidential ticket. This is the party, after all, that built its solid 
South through coded appeals to whites who felt threatened by the 
nameless, dark Other.

Then again, you should have seen the rock-star reception she got from an 
overwhelmingly white crowd last fall when she flipped the coin at a 
University of Alabama football game. It was as if Bear Bryant himself 
had come back to Tuscaloosa.

You could certainly make a case that Rice is doing more than just making 
herself available in case the party finds itself facing a sure 
Democratic victory and turns to her in a desperate Hail Mary. When she 
invited a television crew to roll videotape as she performed her daily 
workout routine, the message wasn't exactly "secretary of state." What's 
the difference between showing the world how you do your stomach 
crunches and donning a funny-looking hat at the state fair?

Her back-to-Birmingham trip last year was chock-full of campaign 
iconography -- hordes of smiling children, acres of patriotic bunting -- 
and even on foreign trips she rarely fails to remind audiences of her 
personal history. Yesterday, in Australia, she began a town hall meeting 
with university students by reminiscing about her youthful promise as a 
musician. A student's question about Iraq led to a disquisition on her 
early years in the segregated South.

Meanwhile, Rice has subtly tried to distance herself and the State 
Department from the worst excesses of the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis -- even 
though, as national security adviser, she was an active participant in 
all the major decisions about Iraq, domestic spying and the 
administration's ambitious, unilateral expansion of executive power. 
"Abu Ghraib was a disgrace," she told the Australian students. "What 
happened there made me sick to my stomach."

Lightning would have to strike for Rice to enter the presidential race 
this time -- something like the fantasy scenario in which Dick 
"Bull's-Eye" Cheney gets fed up and resigns after the midterm election. 
President Bush could then appoint Rice as his new vice president, which 
would instantly put her in play for 2008. Stranger things have happened, 
but not many.

Still, I think it's inevitable that Rice will eventually enter politics. 
The question for the Democratic Party will be how black voters react.

Black conservative Shelby Steele recently speculated with an interviewer 
from the American Enterprise, a conservative journal, about how a race 
between Hillary Clinton and Rice might turn out. "If Hillary runs 
against a man, my guess is there's a certain women's vote out there that 
will go for her, even many Republicans," he said. "But if she's running 
against Condoleezza Rice, that would disappear. A large bit of the black 
vote that Democrats are so desperately dependent upon would also 
disappear. If Condoleezza Rice ran, she could win by simply taking an 
extra 15 percent of the black vote."

But from my own anecdotal observation, Spike Lee speaks for a lot of 
African Americans who have strong negative feelings about Rice. If she 
runs, he told the New York Observer, "African Americans will have to 
really, really, really, really, really , REALLY analyze the secretary of 
state's record, and get past the pigmentation of her skin. . . . I'm not 
going to vote for that woman. No. Way. "

Steele acknowledges that he might be wrong, that Rice might turn out to 
be a lousy politician. Lee acknowledges that "I'm not the spokesperson 
for 45 million African Americans." The truth is that nobody knows how 
voters would respond to a black woman who loyally serves an 
administration so reviled in the black community.

And would those cheering, white 'Bama football fans check her name when 
they're in the privacy of the voting booth?

Nobody knows. But I'll bet that someday -- maybe not soon, but someday 
-- we'll find out.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601400.html
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