Condoleezza Rice is acting strange.
The media is right to hit her for dereliction of duty. She should be at work in DC, but is giving stump speeches in the swing states instead. But that's only part of the story. The real question is: How did a person hired to help Bush with his foreign policy homework, end up as a double-speaking loyalist zombie who now speaks only the language of the Bush doctrine? When did the teacher become the sycophant student?
The frying of Condi Rice's brain speaks volumes to the systemic problems in Bush's approach to policy making and to governing. And it also sheds light on why Bush will lose this election.
"White Rice or Brown?"
A once brilliant expert on US-Russian policy, concert pianist, Provost of Stanford, PhD plus honorary Doctorates, corporate board member--Condi Rice is now little more than a Neo-Con talking doll. Do they really think she is going to pull in votes with her stump speech? Anyone who saw Rice's performance at the 9/11 commission can see otherwise. That toothy smile, that school teacher condescension, that Mamie Eisenhower sense of style--nobody will be inspired by Rice's speech. If Rice swings any voters it will be the result of her unflinching display of pure loyalty to her after-school-project turned political idol. Rice hasn't been thrown on the stump because she speaks well, but because she's the living embodiment of the Bush team ideal: an intellectual turned into a drone. "I gave up my brain for W." This didn't happen overnight.
In a recent documentary on PBS, George Schultz claimed that Rice and George W. first met at an informal meeting where Bush was first pushed to run for President. Whatever the real circumstances, early on the 2000 campaign it became clear that Bush was no ordinary candidate. He was a candidate that had his own tutor. Rice lent a certain legitimacy to his ineptitude and when she was in the room, he looked smart.
But Rice was no ordinary school teacher. Her speech at the 2000 GOP convention made her the poster child for Bush's faux rainbow coalition, a new type of public figure that the American public was seeing and hearing for the first time, but which Bush had been seeking for some time: a highly articulate, exceedingly knowledgeable African American public figure who could quote Horatio Alger and Tolstoy in the same breath.
Side of Rice
In her pre-9/11 incarnation, Rice was pretty much a side dish in the administration, helping Bush with his foreign policy flash cards ("Volpe"="Fox"...excellent!), and always seen with him. The life of a legitimizing figure is always on the hoof and Condi never missed a photo op with W. There they were walking from on the White House lawn. There they go on Airforce One. There they are in the Bush 'copter.
The big agenda after the 2000 fiasco was to have Cheney run the country while Condi gave Bush his GED in foreign affairs. If all went to plan, one 'little war' and all that face time with Rice and Bush would be good to go for re-election fought on national safety and tax cuts.
Steamed Rice
Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! and Kah-boom! Four crashed planes later and Condi's role starts to change fast.
In the days after 9/11 Condi's role as first tutor quickly turned into role as spokesperson. Specifically, Rice became the articulator of impossible positions that gave Bush's Neo-Con inner circle time to come up with lengthier justifications for why they ignored terrorist threats. And she was an easy sell. When Rice asked "Who would have imagined terrorists using plans as missiles?" we wanted to believe her. That serious scowl, those blue suits, that country club diction.
But then the questions started to pile up, and up. Rice became the gathering ground for lots of unanswered questions. One thing that became clear, Rice was not a great spokesperson because she was unable to separate the act of explaining the situation from the act of selling the message. And there's nothing more frustrating than trying to explain something in the time it takes to get out a sound bite, particularly when the explanation is an out right lie.
Then something else happened to Condi as the dust from the towers settled and the dust from Baghdad started to kick up: it wasn't clear whether Condi knew she was lying or not. While Rice was once the source of knowledge, it began to seem more and more than she took information and sold it to the public out of her sheer devotion to the President.
Who can forget that wonderful Freudian slip when Rice called Bush her "husband" by accident. Could it be that the teacher had a thing for the student? In less dangerous times, that would have been a story to pursue.
It was ultimately her testimony to the 9/11 commission that revealed how much she had changed. No longer the calm intellectual, Rice had become an impatient corporate spokesperson of the type that Michael Moore encounters at KMART headquarters when he tries to ambush the corporate board. Condi wasn't mean. She spoke with the smoldering furor of someone who was offended by any suggestion that her boss might be fallible.
Better than anyone, Rice articulated something for the first time in the Bush administration: a genuine indignation at congressional oversight. It was after that that it became clear to me that Condi Rice's brain had been fried in some cataclysmic Neo-Con meltdown. On quite a regular basis, she started saying things like, "The American people just have to be patient," and it seemed pretty clear that she meant it. Be patient? By this time, Richard Clarke had already emerged as a much better teacher to the American public on foreign affairs. Condi Rice was now just a Bush cheerleader.
Rice Capades
It's hard to tell how seductive the action of war has been for Condi Rice. One thing is for sure, however, that her power to input knowledge on global affairs has been swapped for the powerlessness of being a mouthpiece. As we well know, after 9/11 Bush reached for a megaphone--not for studied advice--and Condi was happy to oblige by turning herself into one.
When an administration consumes its intellectuals, when it insists that thought be displaced by blind allegiance, the road to corruption has already been chosen.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Condi Rice has chosen to travel down that road rather than stay at her post in Washington.
But as the President's tutors vanished one by one, so too did any possibility that he might have for actual understanding of the circumstances that his policies had created.
If Kissinger was the model of foreign intellectual turned US warlord, Rice appears to be the organic intellectual turned whig loyalist.
The extent to which her corporate board experience at Chevron set up this transformation remains to be seen. But what is clear for now, Condi Rice's escapades in the swing states have more to do with her fall from dignity than George Bush's chances at re-election.