Hold the Rice

The more I see and hear of Condoleezza Rice, the less I respect her.

Don't get me wrong. I think it would be exciting to have a serious black candidate for president – one who understood freedom, the Constitution, individual rights, the American Dream. I would love to see a great woman – like Margaret Thatcher or Jeanne Kirkpatrick – make a serious bid for the presidency in my lifetime.

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It's just that Condoleezza Rice, unfortunately, is not that person.

I'm sure her knowledge and insight into the old Soviet Union is second to none. But she is making a mess of the Middle East – meddling between Israel and the Palestinian Authority as if they are moral equals.

She may be attractive, wear great clothes and speak authoritatively and with confidence on many issues, but that doesn't make her right.

I heard an interview she gave to Chris Wallace on Fox News over the weekend. He pitched a softball at her. I wanted her to hit it out of the park. Instead, she left me wanting to sit her down and give her a history and civics lesson.

Here's the way the dialogue went:

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Wallace:

The Democrats' No. 2 man in the Senate, Dick Durbin, created quite a stir this week when he compared U.S. treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and the killing fields of Cambodia. Does it make it harder for you to do your job as you travel through the Mideast and push U.S. policy on human rights and democracy when a top American official says we're part of the problem?

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Rice:

Well, we're going to continue to talk about what the United States is doing positively for the people of this region. I'm here, the Iraqi people are voting, the Lebanese people at least are free of Syrian military forces.

And, in fact, we are a country that believes in international law, that believes in living up to our international obligations, including at Guantanamo, where the president made very clear that that was what would govern our efforts and our behavior at Guantanamo.

And I think it's quite clear that the United States simply doesn't fit into any of the categories that were said there. I'm a Soviet specialist; I know what the Soviet gulag was like.

What disturbed me most about this response was not its ineptitude, not its inability to address straightforwardly an outrageous, treasonous statement by a member of the U.S. Senate, not its weakness in explaining who we house at Gitmo and what they would like to do to you, me and Dick Durbin, but this line about "international law."

Is that what it's really all about for this administration? Is it all about a global world order? Do we really believe in "international law"?

Forgive me, but I am still laboring under those schoolboy assumptions that Americans declared their independence in 1776 and meant it. I thought Americans wanted to be different from the rest of the world and seek a better way of doing things.

The word here inside the beltway is that Condoleezza Rice wants to be president. Her disastrous Mideast gambit is, in effect, her attempt at a campaign for the office. She does not want to run as a conventional candidate. She wants the Republicans to draft her. She wants to make herself indispensable to a Republican victory in 2008.

If what we face in 2008 is a race between Condi and Hillary, I'm afraid once again Americans will be faced with not much of a meaningful choice.

Rice will not lead this country in the right direction. She will not help us take our country back. She will not face down our adversaries around the globe nor help us protect ourselves from them here at home.

I truly wish she had the right stuff. She does not.