If the Drudge
Report is to be believed, Condoleezza Rice is at or near the
top of Mitt Romney’s list for running mate. God forbid.
Ms. Rice is by all accounts a wonderful human being. She is
intelligent and poised, and her sensibilities and most of her
values and philosophy are admirable. She is a galvanizing speaker.
But she would be a godawful choice as vice presidential
nominee.
The first requirement for the choice is that the vice president
be immediately ready to be a good president on Day One of the new
administration if some disaster befalls the president. Secretary
Rice fails that test. Despite all of her intelligence and
knowledge, she did a remarkably poor job as National Security
Advisor and as Secretary of State. She showed no sign of strong
managerial ability, no indication she knows how to impose her will
on policy, and no evidence that her policy instincts and analyses
are particularly acute in the first place. On the contrary, she
often was on the wrong side of policy disputes; our world standing
is worse because of it.
As National Security Advisor, she (in)famously failed to
adequately police the raging disputes between Don Rumsfeld’s
Defense Department and Colin Powell’s State Department. What
emerged was often not just a split-the-baby failure, but a
roughly-tear-the-baby approach, with grisly results. From the
earliest days of the U.S.-led coalition’s post-Saddam regency and
reconstruction effort in Iraq, for instance, the endeavor was a
notorious cluster-bumfuzzle, with competing and confusing agendas,
lines of authority, and even personnel. Some top officials were
sent all the way to Iraq, only to arrive and find that nobody
expected them and they weren’t welcome. What began as a triumph
eventually fizzled into a slow-rolling stumble-fest, with the Bush
administration ignoring for nearly three years the wise calls from
multiple sources for more troops and a counter-insurgency strategy
matched to Iraq’s cultural realities. (In fact, much of the
evidence indicates that she remained a staunch opponent of what
became the vaunted “Surge” in Iraq, putting her on the wrong side
of the best decision of President George W. Bush’s entire second
term.)
Granted, the buck doesn’t stop with the National Security
Advisor: It is ultimately the president’s job to make the right
calls. But if a president is hamstrung by a weak hand as NSA, the
likelihood is that he’ll make serious mistakes.
As Secretary of State, meanwhile, Rice was often captured by the
left-leaning State bureaucracy. Her handling of policy towards
North Korea was particularly inept, earning her serious criticism
from numerous conservatives. She also, by some accounts, was far
too slow in recognizing Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the thug he is,
leading to baleful results. She also was an enthusiast of the
radical-environmental Kyoto Treaty. Finally, Rice certainly didn’t
help matters four years ago, and exhibited horrible predictive
abilities to boot, when she praised
the choice of Hillary Clinton as her successor, calling her
“terrific.”
In other words, Rice is clearly experienced and well intentioned
— but again and again, both wrong and ineffective. Even apart from
the politics of choosing her, then, she’s just not the right person
to be a heartbeat from the presidency.
Meanwhile, the politics of a Rice selection, despite the
conventional “wisdom” from fuzzy-thinking Republican insiders,
would be extremely damaging to Romney’s cause.
Oh, sure, she’s a black woman. Wow. Golly gee! The
thinking is not so much that she will therefore attract a sudden
surge of black voters or that left-leaning women will somehow flock
to the Romney ticket, but that a whole lot of “moderates” of
different hues will appreciate the optics and “message” that Romney
will supposedly send by choosing Rice. Combined with Rice’s
undisputed star power and impressiveness behind a microphone, this
message of inclusiveness is supposed to be the proverbial “game
changer.”
Perish the thought.
If Romney chooses Condi Rice, he chooses the single former
official most closely associated, in a very personal way, with G.W.
Bush. It is in some ways undeserved, but Bush remains a profoundly
unpopular former president, and the Obama campaign is all but
drooling at every possible chance to make this election a
referendum on the supposedly horrible Bush past rather than the
even worse Obama present. Worse, the part of the Bush legacy that
is most unpopular, overwhelmingly so (if, again, not entirely
fairly), is the part most directly associated with Rice. Iraq.
Weapons of mass destruction. Abu Ghraib. “Torture.” Missing Osama
bin Laden at Tora Bora. Nation-building failures in
Afghanistan.
Nothing would make Obama happier than replaying what so many
Americans consider to be bad memories, and tying them to Romney.
Nothing would do more to undermine Romney’s message of representing
desirable, forward-looking change. By choosing Rice, he might as
well forfeit the election right now and save Republican activists
and donors the misery of wasted effort.
