About Condi: Advertisement for Herself

Have you ever seen a speech that was so obviously an advertisement for a future career in politics? I saw Andrea Mitchell interviewing her later, and Condi said no, no, I'm not interested in that, my life in is Palo Alto, etc. Sure.

It was an excellent speech. But it wasn't an excellent speech for the Romney-Ryan ticket so much as it was an excellent speech for her own purposes. That is, she didn't really seem to be discussing Republican doctrine so much as she was discussing Rice Doctrine (New Mexico Governor Susanna Martinez, who followed Rice, also gave a very good speech that actually served the ticket better). Dick Morris, who wrote that Hillary vs. Condi book, just might turn out to be right about something after all.

California Republicans, or some of them, will plead with her to run for governor. But obviously she's big enough to shoot right for the White House if she wants to. She'll have to make the decision, and let's be blunt about it, that she's ready to talk about why a reasonably attractive and brilliant woman who can do everything from golf to play classical piano never got married.

And of course questions will arise from certain other speeches of hers, ones she'd rather we forget, like "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" or that imperishable classic,“I don’t think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile ... even in retrospect there was nothing to suggest that" after a plot to do exactly that in Genoa had been thwarted. But people forget these things.