{"id":16219,"date":"2008-04-07T14:40:19","date_gmt":"2008-04-07T18:40:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/15137.html"},"modified":"2008-04-07T14:40:19","modified_gmt":"2008-04-07T18:40:19","slug":"condoleezza-rice-an-unlikely-mccain-running-mate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/condoleezza-rice-an-unlikely-mccain-running-mate\/","title":{"rendered":"Condoleezza Rice, an unlikely McCain running mate"},"content":{"rendered":"

About two weeks ago, the Washington Note reported<\/a> that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stopped by Grover Norquist’s weekly “Wednesday Meeting,” at which conservative leaders, thinkers, and operatives get together to plot and scheme. Apparently, Rice’s attendance was unusual.<\/p>\n

A “major” Republican operative told Steve Clemons, “Someone like Condi Rice doesn’t go to Grover Norquist’s den to talk about the Annapolis Middle East peace process. She’s going to secure her future in Republican politics and to position herself as a ‘potential’ VP candidate on the McCain ticket.”<\/p>\n

I found this a little far-fetched, and basically ignored it. Similarly, Gallup asked Republican voters an open-ended question (no prompted possible answers) last week: “Can you name someone you would like to see John McCain choose as his vice presidential running mate?” Rice was third<\/a>, with 8% (behind Mike Huckabee at 18% and Mitt Romney at 15%), though this seems largely the result of high name recognition.<\/p>\n

But all of this took on an added interest yesterday, when Dan Senor, a former military spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, raised the prospect<\/a> on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” yesterday.<\/p>\n

Mr. Senor said Ms. Rice spoke last week before an unusual forum for a secretary of state: a meeting of economic conservatives led by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.<\/p>\n

“Condi Rice has been actively, actually in recent weeks, campaigning for this,” Mr. Senor said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This seems wildly unlikely.
\n
\nAsked about this yesterday afternoon, McCain told reporters, “I missed those signals<\/a>.” The senator added, however, that Rice is a “great American,” whose “overall record is very, very meritorious.”<\/p>\n

It’s obviously little more than a subject of scuttlebutt right now, but it’s hard to imagine the circumstances that would prompt McCain to pick Rice for the Republican ticket. Indeed, Senor didn’t really have any evidence beyond Rice’s appearance at Norquist’s meeting, which is pretty thin substantiation and hardly constitutes “actively” campaigning.<\/p>\n

For one thing, Rice doesn’t seem at all interested. In February, she explained<\/a>, “I have always said that the one thing that I have not seen myself doing is running for elected office in the United States. I didn’t even run for high-school president, it’s not in my genes.”<\/p>\n

For another, unless McCain is anxious to help Democrats tie him directly to Bush’s failed presidency, he’s not likely to pick one of the president’s closest buddies. (There was that one time Rice inadvertently referred to Bush as her “husband”….)<\/p>\n

For that matter, she’s not exactly part of the Republican in-crowd. The party’s base seems to tolerate her, but it’s not as if she has a solid relationship with the GOP powers that be. Indeed, most Republicans have little confidence that she’s conservative on the issues they care about most.<\/p>\n

And finally, not to put too fine a point on the issue, but in her eight years in government service, Rice has been truly awful. Weapons inspector David Kay, charged with finding WMD after the Iraq invasion, referred <\/a>to Rice in Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial” as “probably the worst national security adviser since the office was created.” As Secretary of State, Rice has repeatedly been wrong about Iraq, has been careless with the facts, and has no real accomplishments to speak of.<\/p>\n

That hasn’t stopped Republican candidates before, of course, but given the hurdles, I suspect Rice would be fairly low on the McCain list of VP possibilities. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About two weeks ago, the Washington Note reported that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stopped by Grover Norquist’s weekly “Wednesday Meeting,” at which conservative leaders, thinkers, and operatives get together to plot and scheme. Apparently, Rice’s attendance was unusual. A “major” Republican operative told Steve Clemons, “Someone like Condi Rice doesn’t go to Grover Norquist’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}