I guess I should say that Condi Rice's race and gender are not the most important things about her career and abilities. But I'm still amazed at how little credit this president gets for promoting a black woman to such a position, and, more importantly, by his obvious respect and admiration for her. His management style is clearly post-racial, and his comfort with female peers is impressive. You know, Bill Clinton was celebrated for his progressiveness, and ease with African-Americans. But it's inconceivable that he would have given so much power and authority to a black female peer. Why does Bush get no respect on this score? I guess it reveals that much of the left's diversity mania is about the upholding of a certain political ideology, rather than ethnic or gender variety itself. Depressing.
"Inconceivable" that Bill Clinton would give "so much power and authority to a black female peer"? Inconceivable to whom? Not to Bill Clinton, whose administration saw the first black female Surgeon General, as well as the first female Secretary of State. It's silly to presume that Clinton wouldn't have nominated a black female as SoS had there been one he considered qualified.
Rice, on the other hand, has proven all but incompetent at coordinating national security policy and managing inter-agency conflict in her role as National Security Adviser. Her views and strategies in the war on terror are hopelessly mired in her background as a Cold War-Russia specialist and its paradigm of state-to-state conflict. Her value as an administrator lies entirely in her loyalty to the president, and in the fact that she hews completely to his political ideology. Her recent record suggests that as Secretary of State she will serve merely as a conduit for the president's one-page-summary-informed policy whims, enforcing the White House's line and tamping down any dissent from within the State Department, that is, from the very people who've been consistently right where the White House has been consistently wrong over the past four years.
And there's the big difference between Democrats and Republicans on affirmative action. Democrats openly recognize the benefits of diversity and support affirmative action as a means of achieving it, but at the end of the day they appoint qualified people regardless of race. Republicans decry affirmative action as "reverse-racism," but cynically use race whenever they can to indemnify underqualified racial minority conservatives from criticism.
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