As many in the Bush administration find their stature is decreased during Term Two: Bush The Sequel one person’s star is on the ascent, writes the Washington Post’s David Ignatius:
Condoleezza Rice had an interesting office visitor on Monday — none other than her old mentor and the nation’s realist in chief, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. It was the first serious chat they’ve had after many months of strained relations, and it may be a symbol for a subtle shift that has been taking place at Rice’s State Department….
Rice stands at the intersection of the Iraq debate. Watching her try to find a balance among Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites, not to mention Democrats and Republicans, I am reminded that in her younger days, she was a figure skater. She learned to keep her balance on quarter-inch blades as she moved around the rink. Remaining upright required finesse and a little luck — with that tiny, quarter-inch margin of error.
Rice has undergone a remarkable transformation since she took over the State Department early this year. Gone is the tight, moralizing style she often displayed as national security adviser. Leaving the White House seems to have given her more space, emotionally and intellectually. She’s more relaxed, expansive, curious, funny. And she has proved increasingly effective. Her hold-the-plane personal diplomacy two weeks ago in Jerusalem produced a breakthrough agreement between Israel and the Palestinians on Gaza border crossings.
The Gaza agreement was Rice’s first real “Kissingerian” moment, and in some of her public comments, she’s sounding like a realist in the Kissinger-Scowcroft tradition. The idealistic, belligerent approach of the neoconservatives isn’t much in evidence in her State Department. Colleagues say that she’s running the department with confidence and that she’s as good at administering her own agency as she was bad at coordinating interagency disputes when she was national security adviser.
Time will tell if this is an accurate verdict or not. But, unmistakably, many analysts on the right and the left do tend to get caught up focusing on one issue and judging a political figure on that. In the case of the Bush administration, so many things have gone wrong for it that it’s hard to make the case that it’s on the ascent in many other areas. But Rice does seem to be coming into her own in several foreign policy areas, despite coming under fire in others.
Which raises the question: is former Clinton friend and now Clinton nemesis Dick Morris correct (I mean, there’s always a first time) in his analylses suggesting CR may have a future in Presidential politics? But note that even if she has potential that doesn’t mean other ambitious GOPers are going to hand her the nomination — if she indeed ever decides to go for it. You can see one of them handing her the VICE PRESIDENTIAL nomination, though…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.