Propping Up Condi

Oh, Good Lord:

From the article:

Rice is not accustomed to failure. The prodigious accomplishments of her youth--she learned Beethoven at 5, finished college at 19 and earned tenure at Stanford at 26--have been followed by a glide to global prominence. Even as the Bush Administration's support has slid to historic depths, Rice's image has been relatively unsullied. She remains not just the most glamorous member of the Bush Cabinet but also its most popular, with job-approval ratings 20 points higher than her boss's. Among the top officials in the Administration, she is the only one who could reasonably expect to have a political future beyond 2008.

The Economist has a somewhat different view of Bush's Other Wife:

Her fingerprints are on some of the worst mistakes of the first Bush term. She claimed the White House was unaware of the CIA's doubts about whether Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger, for example, despite the fact that her office had received two memos on the subject and a call from the CIA director. But her culpability is deeper than that. When Ms Rice ran the National Security Council (NSC), it was hopelessly dysfunctional—torn asunder by disputes between the hawks (Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld) and the doves (then secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage).

Dealing with a feud between such big political beasts was probably too much for anybody, let alone a relatively inexperienced newcomer. And Mr Bush bears ultimate responsibility for the acts of his administration. Still, Ms Rice spent more time with her boss than anybody else, briefing him every day and spending weekends with his family. She could have done more to force him to listen to Mr Powell's warnings, which he was temperamentally inclined to ignore. She could also have done more to warn him about the lack of preparation for post-Saddam Iraq.

Ms Rice was given a chance to redeem her reputation when she was made secretary of state in the second Bush term. Mr Bush signalled that he wanted a different foreign-policy approach from his first, which Mr Armitage once characterised as “Look, fucker, you do what we want.” She dreamed of reinforcing the expansion of America's hard power with an expansion of its soft power. And she brought valuable resources to her mission: a close relationship with the president, a penchant for multilateralism, a collection of deputies who wanted to reach out to the UN, and, for a while, an adoring press. But her bubble was burst by Israel's invasion of Lebanon. The administration started by trying to give Israel the time it needed to destroy Hizbullah. Ms Rice declared that the world was witnessing “the birth pangs of a new Middle East”. The policy was a disaster: America eventually had to broker a deal that left Hizbullah triumphantly in place. Ms Rice's words continue to haunt her on her current tour of the Middle East. If she is so keen on democracy, why is she cosying up to dictators in Egypt and Saudi Arabia?

The state of State
Ms Rice has also proved a disappointing manager of the State Department—the institution that was supposed to be the engine of a new diplomatic offensive. She has lost her number two, Robert Zoellick, and her personal adviser, Philip Zelikow, both impressive men, and still has a significant number of positions to fill. The department spent an unprecedented six months finding a replacement for Mr Zoellick.

These failures are surprising given Ms Rice's career before she entered government. As a child growing up in segregated Alabama, she concluded that she needed to be “twice as good” as whites in order to succeed, and notched up a stunning record of achievement—becoming a fine pianist and figure-skater as a child, graduating from university with top honours at 19, earning tenure at Stanford University at a tender age, and becoming provost of the university at 38.

But the traits that made Ms Rice such a perfect protégée may be working against her now she is at the top of the tree. Ms Rice made her career by impressing powerful establishment figures—from Brent Scowcroft (who brought her into the NSC when she was 34) to Messrs Bush senior and junior. But what happens when your patrons disagree about fundamentals? Ms Rice tried a dose of fudge during the first Bush administration (you can find people on both sides of the diplomatic wars of the first term who believed that she was on their side). But mostly she chose to flatter her current patron.

I'm really getting tired about what a fine pianist and figure skater Condoleeza Rice is. That has nothing to do with her job as Secretary of State. What baffles me is how someone who is on paper quite intelligent has turned out to be such an incompetent Secretary of State. Is it that her specialization in the Soviet Union colors her view of every foreign policy challenge? Or does her blind devotion and loyalty to -- dare I call it a crush -- George W. Bush blind her to what he really is?

It is undoubtedly a mark of how lame the Republican presidential field is for 2008 that Time is seeking to burnish Rice's reputation, for I'm sure that in her, Republicans see the "two-fer" who can defeat either Barack Obama OR Hillary Clinton. The problem is that she has done an absolutely abysmal job in the executive branch, and there's no reason to think that the woman who sat in front of Congress and euphemized the escalation of the Iraq form in the jargon of boob jobs is any more ready to be president than the either of the non-white-male Democrats against whom the Republican seem to want to run her.