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Bush-Rice 2004? The rise and rise of Condi Her presence is not obtrusive but it is constant. President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is rarely that far away from the president. Her office is a few doors down the corridor from the Oval Office, she's a weekend guest at Camp David almost all the time, she's central to Russia policy, a fixture at war counsels, and reliable crisis-avoider and manager in all types of emergencies. When Bush, for example, realized that he would face embarrassment at this weekend's Monterrey summit on foreign aid, it was a "Get me Condi" moment. The negotiations that significantly increased Washington's foreign aid budget last week were conducted with the World Bank president, James D. Wolfensohn, by Condoleezza Rice. This was too critical a matter to be left to the usual point-man, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. Rice isn't the first National Security Adviser to exercise enormous influence on a president. Kissinger was Nixon's, after all. But Rice's widely acknowledged role as closest confidant to Bush is particularly striking given the stature of her colleagues. Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell, are not exactly foreign policy light-weights. They are of course critical members of the inner circle, but it's Condi who tends to get the last, confidential word. As Bob Woodward has reported, Bush would often ask Rice, during the tensest moments of the post-September 11 crisis, to attend meetings but not to speak. This wasn't because he didn't want her advice. It was because he wanted her to be a second, silent arbiter of the discussion. He wanted her not to advance a position, but to act as an alternate set of eyes and ears, to check her gut against his in weighing the options. And quite regularly, the last conference Bush has about many foreign policy decisions is with Condi. The relationship started with the campaign, when Rice was essentially appointed as Bush's foreign policy guru. She has all the Establishment credentials. Educated at the University of Denver and Notre Dame, Rice became a professor of political science at Stanford, then special assistant to the first president Bush, then senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute, before becoming provost of Stanford. This impeccable conservative pedigree comes with what are clearly formidable schmoozing skills. Her name gives it away. It's from the Italian musical notation con 'dolcezza' - to play "with sweetness" - and Rice deploys that low-key, unruffled timbre throughout her work. It's partly what Bush likes about her. Not just the expertise and collegiality - but the ordered precision and politesse that helps him keep private order amid public mayhem. And of course she's a black woman. I've kept this till last, since it's not the most important thing about her. But it's still, it seems to me, an amazing fact that one of the most important members of Washington's inner circle, currently among the most powerful inner circles the world has ever seen, is a member of a classically marginalized group. If this were a Democratic administration, you could be sure that the press would have hailed her as a breakthrough in civil rights, and touted her gender and ethnicity as a central part of her appeal. The Bush style eschews that kind of identity-mongering. But her presence sends an unmistakable signal about what conservatism should mean now: completely comfortable with minorities, eager to incorporate them into the heart of culture and government, but never crudely exploitative or racially obsessed, like parts of the left. Her presence in the administration is also, I think, medicine for the abuse of women that occurred under Clinton. Don't get me wrong. Many Clinton policies were friendlier to the agenda of various feminist groups than Bush's. Clinton deserves credit for greatly increasing the number of women in government, and for appointing many minorities and women to cabinet rank. Clinton appointed the first female secretary of state and the first female attorney-general, for example. But the role of those two women, Madeleine Albright and Janet Reno, shows something less admirable about Clinton's personal relations with female colleagues. They were never really part of the loop. Reno was an attorney-general more estranged from her president than any in recent history. Albright was a cipher. When real foreign policy work needed to be accomplished, Clinton turned to men with whom he was more comfortable - Sandy Berger, for example, or Richard Holbrooke. No American president has ever had such a key, close political relationship with a female equal than Bush with Rice. It's very striking, very modern and barely noticed by a press that prefers the archetype of Bush as a macho cowboy than a yuppie, multicultural businessman of the 21st Century. What's more this woman is black. And by black, I mean much more like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas than Colin Powell. Powell is from a family of Caribbean immigrants. His lineage doesn't fuse him with the scar of slavery, segregation and Southern unrest that attaches itself to most African-Americans. Rice was born in 1954, the year that racial segregation in America's high-schools was finally ruled unconstitutional. But Rice, like many others, saw little change at first, and was in segregated schools in the South until a teenager. A nursery school class-mate of hers was one of four girls killed when white extremists bombed a church in Alabama in 1963. But she had a classic middle-class success story. The grand-daughter of a devout share-cropper, she lived to see her own father become vice-chancellor of the University of Denver and graduate from the college herself at the tender age of 19. Driven by hard-working parents, Rice could play concert piano, speak four languages, and earn a doctorate in her early twenties. She is perhaps an almost painful example of what opportunities do actually exist for black Americans with stable families and middle-class values in America today. That's surely part of why Bush picked her. She's not just an advisor; she's an emblem. All of which has led some in Washington to wonder what's next for her. It can surely only be more. Most believe that Dick Cheney may well decide to bow out of running for vice-president again for health or family reasons. Could Bush-Rice be the potential Republican ticket in 2004? The attractions are obvious. Rice does several things for Bush. She helps eradicate the gender gap, the biggest liability for Republican candidates. She could also help Bush to achieve his dream of winning more than the paltry ten percent of black votes he did in 2000, a demographic group Democrats desperately need to keep locked up to keep an edge in presidential politics. Rice - coming from the South and Mountain West, but also provost of one of California's greatest universities - makes geographic sense as well. And, best of all, she's a trusted conservative. Her instincts are Bush's: realist, uncompromising but flexible in a pinch. And he trusts her deeply. When you think about it, it's hard to think of any rival in the cabinet with the same credentials for a future vice-presidential nomination. And what it would do for the image of the Republican party as a whole would be momentous. There's a catch. Rice is single. There hasn't been an unmarried candidate for president or vice-president in modern times. This shouldn't matter, but it might. In the hideously invasive world of today's press, Rice's private life might be scrutinized in ways she would rightly find intolerable. But knowing Bush, this wouldn't stop him. He picks the people he wants - against conventional wisdom. Everyone forgets how controversial a choice Dick Cheney was. In 2004, the shock could be exponentially larger. March 24, 2002, The Sunday Times of London copyright © 2002 Andrew Sullivan |
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