Qualifications Vs. Disqualifications For Office
Photo by Flickr user JimNtexas. Used under a Creative Commons license.
It's probably no secret that I'm less enthusiastic for Sen. Hillary Clinton's Presidential bid than I am Sen. Barack Obama. And while I do support Sen. Obama I also spend a lot of time wrestling with the question of would I support any woman candidate (yes, off the top of my head I'd cheerily support a number of them including Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire, my state's senior Senator Patty Murray, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and it sounds like there are a number of other rising-star women Governors who either are now or soon will be wonderfully qualified and likely to get my support.) The other question, one that gets posed any time I go back to my paleo-liberal roots in southern Appalachia, is whether America, especially *conservative* America is "ready for" a woman president. As it happens, I said yes several years ago and now someone else has taken up the point.
Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker says, with a difficult-to-determine amount of tongue in cheek, that John McCain should designate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be his vice-presidential running mate.
If McCain really wants to have it all—to refurbish his maverick image without having to flip-flop on the panderings that have tarnished it; to galvanize the attention of the press, the nation, and the world; to make a bold play for the center without seriously alienating “the base”—then he can avail himself of a highly interesting option: Condoleezza Rice.
To deal first with the obvious: Rice may be “only” the second woman and the second African-American to be Secretary of State, but she is indisputably the highest-ranking black female official ever to have served in any branch of the United States government. Her nomination to a constitutional executive office would cost McCain the votes of his party’s hardened racists and incorrigible misogynists. They are surely fewer in number, though, than the people who would like to participate in breaking the glass ceiling of race or gender but, given the choice, would rather do so in a more timid way, and/or without abandoning their party. And with Rice on the ticket the Republicans could attack Clinton or Obama with far less restraint.
By choosing Rice, McCain would shackle himself anew to Bush’s Iraq war. But it’s hard to see how those chains could get much tighter than he has already made them. Rice would fit nicely into McCain’s view of the war as worth fighting but, until Donald Rumsfeld’s exit from the Pentagon, fought clumsily. And it would be fairly easy to establish a story line that would cast Rice as having been less Bush’s enabler than a loyal subordinate who nevertheless pushed gently from within for a more reasonable, more diplomatic approach.
Rice is already fourth in line for the Presidency, and getting bumped up three places would be a shorter leap than any of the three Presidential candidates propose to make. It’s true that her record in office has been one of failure, from downgrading terrorism as a priority before 9/11 to ignoring the Israel-Palestine problem until (almost certainly) too late. But this does not seem to have done much damage to her popularity.
Jason Zengerle of The New Republic says of this proposal
...the more I think about it, is so cynically brilliant that I'm sort of surprised Hertzberg actually put it into print, lest someone in the McCain campaign take him up on it and ride it all the way to victory in November.
To be honest I'm not even sure it would be a cynical choice. As Hertzberg points out, all of Rice's perceived political liabilities are actually *major benefits* inside her party. And her perceived *social* liabilities -- her sex, her class, her race, her education, her speculated-about orientation -- would or ought to be benefits to Democrats, feminists, liberals, and progressives. And goodness knows that compared to Senator Obama, let alone Senator Clinton, *let alone* Senator McCain, while you don't want her within eleven time zones of the "red phone" during business hours (when she'd surely consider using it to launch simultaneous "preventative self-defense" wars against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia, and very likely France) there's probably no one in government except possibly Dick Cheney who's more qualified to answer it at 3:00 A.M.
And, without the least bit of irony intended, if recent defenders of Senator Clinton have been sincere in their belief that sex should trump character or policy, then they would surely be equally vocal in their preference for a ticket with Sec. Rice at #2 behind a very old Sen. McCain in very poor health to a vital if extraordinarily progressive Sen. Obama with.. *any* choice at #2 including possibly Sen. Clinton.
Speaking for myself, if the Republicans did select Sec. Rice (as I suggested they might several years ago) then I'll say good for them for sticking with what's really essential to their core values about Rice in their eyes -- her cynical corporate corruption, her adherence to neoconservatism, her cold-war era Russian Studies education, her experience as the National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, her deft ability to coach unschooled, my-pet-goat-reading bumpkins through intricate preparations for war, her unwavering commitment to military adventurism, her willingness to accommodate communist China and excoriate communist Cuba -- and ignore what's really not very essential at all: her membership in classes, sexes, and races who's bodies her party has raised itself to prominence by grinding under its wheels.
Of course I'd then turn around and work my ass off to elect a Democrat whether it was a less-qualified-woman-than-Rice Senator Clinton or a man like Senator Obama. But that doesn't mean I think it would be a bad idea to nominate or elect a woman, just that it would be a *very* bad idea to elect Condoleezza Rice. (Or, if she continually insists on taking pages from Karl Rove's playbook, the otherwise eminently vote-worty Senator Clinton.)
But yes absolutely, if even conservative America ready for a woman President the question of "whether" has been resolved and now it just boils down to a matter of *who.*
I had said so myself, unfortunately on someone's else's blog. The Republican's answer to race and gender.
I do think that if she was in charge, we would see a slightly different person. What a lot of people don't realized is that she is a product of strict middle class Negro upbringing, not of someone whose assimilated.
[Hi Five! I agree that her behavior as chief executive might be different than her behavior in any of her cabinet-level positions. I don't think that I could trust her. --fl]
Condi fills a niche similar to what Colin Powell has also done for the Republicans - she's a figleaf (sorry, my dear) for the racism that's still pretty rampant in their party. She's a token. So someone like my dad (who though I love him very much is a Rush-listening right-winger) can embrace her without shedding his racism.
I am only one degree of separation removed from Condi, which sort of gives me the heebie-jeebies. A college classmate of mine had her as an advisor. She was kind and supportive, I heard at the time. But she later served as provost, and that's probably her most relevant training toward becoming the scary figure that you described so well, figleaf.
And I agree with Zengerle - the idea of Condi as running mate is alarmingly clever. This political season is turning me into a nervous mess.
By the way, in calling Condi a token I *don't* mean she's unqualified or untalented. Not at all. I just mean that she allows Republicans to say, "See, we're not racist - or sexist! We have a black woman at the top of our ranks, and we even have black friends!"
[See, I'm a little more sanguine about that, Sungold For instance the one, single, only nice thing I can say about the Bushes is that they only color they care about is green, not white or brown. George Walker Bush has evidently always been perfectly at home with multimillionaire ball players of any color... and utterly indifferent to the fate of non-multimillionaires regardless of color as well. Rice? I'm pretty sure he just saw "multimillionaire, neocon, cold warrior, oil-industry insider, and crony captialist and he was there. I'm *positive* Cheney and his dad legitimately believed she was the best choice to get him up to speed on his make-Dan-Quayle-look-like-a-genius foreign relations deficits. And I'm betting the majority of Republicans... or at least the 19% "base" who think Bush is doing still just misunderstood... wouldn't balk at her either. Grumble a little, maybe. Vote in lockstep? You bet. --fl]
I agree with pretty much your entire post. I voted for Hillary (before the 'vote for McCain' bit she pulled), and I still do like her, but I'm liking her less and less as the campaign wears on. I'd still support her over any republican, though, and quite enthusiastically. I'd love to see a woman become president, but not at the expense of progressive/liberal policies and government, though.
And out of curiosity, where in Southern Appalachia are you from? I grew up in southern WV.
[Hey, KS. I was born in western North Carolina and grew in east Tennessee. --fl]