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What Condi Served Hillary for Dinner
Lewis Whyld/AP
As the Bush administration comes to a close, the Secretary of State opens up to The Daily Beast about the past eight years and what she's doing next.
Last night outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hosted her successor, Hillary Clinton, for a private dinner of mushroom soup, sea bass, and wild rice in her apartment at the Watergate. Is there a more high-octane meeting in recent memory that any policy wonk would have rather attended? Washington’s two most powerful women, history-makers both, with little reason at this point to hold back, exhuming the past eight years—and predicting the next. Though we’ll never know exactly what words passed between them, today Rice spoke with CBS News correspondent and Daily Beast contributor Dan Raviv. She talked about her relationship with the woman who will soon have her job, her personal excitement about Barack Obama’s election, and why she’s now leaving Washington to go back to “where I belong.”
“We shouldn't deceive ourselves that we've overcome everything about race. And the particular witch's brew that is race and poverty is still very, very hard.”
Q: How is Hillary Clinton going to do as Secretary?
A: She'll be great. She is somebody of great intelligence. She is somebody who really loves this country, who speaks forcefully and well for American interests and values.
Q: Are you personally excited about Barack Obama becoming our next President and our first African-American President?
A: Sure, it's meaningful. It's meaningful to me personally. It's meaningful to the country. I'm a kid from Birmingham, Alabama, and until we moved to Denver, Colorado, when I was 12 I didn't have a white classmate—the whole time when I went to school in Alabama. So sure! This is a huge move forward for our country. Our country has been getting there. You know, we've had back-to-back African-American Secretaries of State! We have heads of Fortune 500 companies who are black. The world's greatest golfer—not exactly a sport known for African-American dominance—is an African-American. And so, slowly but surely this country has been overcoming race.
I want to make a point, though: we're still not race-blind. We shouldn't deceive ourselves that we've overcome everything about race. And the particular witch's brew that is race and poverty is still very, very hard. And unless we improve our ability to provide a quality education for underprivileged kids, we're not going to really overcome in a massive way our past.
Q: May I take it that you actually preferred a victory for Senator Obama, and not John McCain?
A: I have constantly told people that I was Secretary of State and I was not going to get into a partisan debate. And I would vote my ballot in a secret way, as all Americans do. But I just want to acknowledge that after the election took place, it was a special time for Americans.
Q: When you leave this job, Madame Secretary, what's your plan? Where are you going?
A: I'm going west of the Mississippi, where I belong. I'll go back to Stanford. I'm on leave from Stanford!
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Rice states, "having not had an attack on our soil really since the 19th century." Doesn't December 7, 1941 count as an attack on our soil?
She voted for Obama....I can feel it in my bones.
"What she's doing next"?
What did Condo do in the first place? And what has she done lately, besides give a piano recital for the Queen of England while Mumbai burned?
Arlan001:
Yes, Condo's historical specialization in Communist-era Czechoslovakia really shows; not only Pearl Harbor, but Pancho Villa's raids into Texas (which led to an failed expedition, led by Pershing, into Mexico to capture Villa), the Japanese invasion during World War II of the Aleutian Islands (certainly "our soil," if not a state), and Japanese balloon-launched bombings constitute attacks on our soil in the twentieth century.
Hawaii wasn't a U.S. state in 1941. It became a state in 1959. So no, it doesn't count.
When is somebody going to call this b-word out? Just because she can ice skate, play classical piano, and be black when it's convenient, doesn't mean her mouth is a prayer book. The only thing she did well during the past eight years was serve as an apologist for the sorriest administration in U.S. history, and defend her so-called integrity from , both vehemently and vociferously, whenever she was hauled before Congress to explain her shortcomings and failures. Let's face it. She presided over an illegal, preemptive war in Iraq. North Korea developed nuclear weapons on her watch and Iran is close to doing the same. She failed to achieve even a semblance of a Middle East peace accord, as Hezbollah expanded its reach in Lebanon and fought our ally Israel to a draw. She and Lil Bush were continually poked in the eye by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Meanwhile, Bolivia and coughed up a leftist regime. The rest of Latin America, including woman-led Chile and Argentina have been ignored. Russia invaded Georgia and cannibalized its own economic elite then ignored her protestations. She and confrere Alberto Gonzales were exposed as having sanctioned the use of torture and turned a blind eye to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. She of the Ferragamo shoes and the steely-eyed press interview is nothing more than the attractive face on that pile of dogshit known as the Bush Presidency. Who needs her sudden applause for the newly-elected Black President? Especially since she spent most of her career seeking favor and denying her blackness within the lily-white confines of conservative Repulicanism? She can go west of the Mississippi and spend the rest of her life writing travel books and opining about what it all meant. You can rest assured I'll never spend a dime on those books -- nor another moment if I can help it -- listening to what she might have to say.
The multi-talented well educated Rice has done a beter than adequate job under very difficult circumstances. There's a good chance that she's not hit the peak in her career. I have a sense that there's much more to this woman than has managed to emerge so far. And if "that's all she wrote" then farewell and thank you for a job well done, but I'll be watching for the next chapter anyway. To be sure there are critics aplenty. I wonder how many of them are as successful in their chosen professions as Rice has been in hers.
Hey, Condi, Sea Bass is an endangered species. Are you that oblivous and/or insensitive to what's happening in the world around you?
Am I the only one who thinks that a person who was so involved in all the major foreign policy decisions of the past eight years wants to write a book on K-12 EDUCATION? Granted, that is a major issue, but I find it strange. If tha was/is her passion, perhaps she would have been better suited to head up the Department of Education.
What is it about African Americans like Condoleezza Rice that they have to claim that any American who has any African ancestry is an African American. Ms Rice claims that Tiger Woods is an African American. Nonsense! Tiger Woods' mother is Thai and surely the Secretary of State of all people should know that Thailand is in Asia. Given that his father claimed African and Native American ancestry, if anything Woods is an Asian American. Of course, that doesn't suit the politics of race in the US and so time and again I've seen African Americans claim Woods to be an African American. To his great credit Woods rejects the inaccurate label 'African American' and instead accurately describes himself as mixed race.
Washington's two most powerful women ?
Is Nancy Pelosi chopped liver ?
Thank you.
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