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archived: 16 - 22 Oct, 2005 Back Next UPDATED: October 18, 2005 MADAME PRESIDENT In November, 2004 shortly after last year’s election, it occurred to me that the next presidential contest would be between two already discernable candidates: one who could not be stopped from winning the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, and the only Republican who could unquestionably defeat her, Condoleezza Rice. I discussed the collision of the two most powerful women in America with a friend of mine in the Washington press corps with close ties to Hillary. He considered it risible at the time. He argued that Rice was not a politician (right) and not really a Republican (wrong). He said that she had no political skills (right) or ambition (wrong) and she could never win the Republican nomination (wrong again). Be that as it may, and much of these initial opinions were based on misinformation, Rice will be the Republican candidate in 2008 if Hillary Clinton is headed for the Democratic nomination. If that contest actually takes place, I predict that Rice will be virtually unstoppable. In fact, the only way to defeat Rice is to discredit neoconservativism over the course of the next eighteen months. After that point, it will be too late. This summer, two more portents arrived in my office. The first came from my old associate, Dick Morris. He appeared on Fox News to trumpet the sales of his next book, The Next Great Presidential Race, which is now being published in America. Morris’s thesis, that Hillary and Condi will vie for the presidency in 2008. Obvious to many of us who keep an eye on these things, Morris sets out a salient and workmanlike case for this inevitable match-up. He is highly selective in his arguments and he displays his own prejudices along the way. Morris is quite a fan of the Israeli right, for instance. Morris is a deeply conservative consultant who unsurprisingly supports neoconservative ideology hook-line-and-sinker. Finally, he is deeply mistrustful of Hillary Clinton. You see, Morris has worked for the Clintons a little too long. He was a consultant to them when they were still in Little Rock. When counseling the two of them about one of the last governor’s races late one night in the Governor’s Mansion, Bill Clinton beat him to a whimpering pulp. Shocked, hurt and frightened, Morris sought consolation from Raymond Strother. The account is in Strother’s political autobiography, Falling Up. Eventually, the Clintons patched things up with Morris, and he steered them to an easy victory in 1996. Make no mistake, Morris is a formidable political consultant, but few realize the depth of his personal conservatism. It is profound. He is as dyed-in-the-wool neocon, and Condi Rice has become his idol. The second omen that appeared to me was a report from a friend in Washington. Realizing the inevitability of the Hillary nomination for the presidency, the top-ranking Republican political consultants were in the process of engineering the Rice victory for 2008. These machinations were really not all that difficult to predict. Consider the following. How would Bill Frist or John McCain fare against Hillary? Answer, Not very well. How about Jeb Bush? After his eldest brother twists slowly in the winds of political change for the next three years, no member of the Bush family may ever be in position to steal the presidency again. Who does that leave? Not many. Giuliani, Warner, Allen are easily written off for the top of the ticket. Hillary would crush them. Condi Rice then moves swiftly into the foreground. She has it all, or at least, enough of what it will take to craft and mold a neoconservative victory around her in a toe-to-toe contest with Hillary. It will not really matter who gets the most votes, even in the Electoral College. These factors do not really determine the outcome of presidential elections in the Unites States of America any more. As anyone can easily see from the past two US presidential elections, the top job is up for auction and can be stolen if the game plan is stealthy enough and the players adroit enough. America has lost its republic, and nobody seems to have noticed – except for a few (very few) of the people. The characters of the two women in question are both fascinating. Each in their inimitable way is impeccable. Clinton is from a conscientiously working class background, and she married into that same strata of American society. The couple has become the most successful in American political history. Rice is from a self consciously middle class background, and she bought into the deeply reactionary notion of individual achievement. Propelled by Affirmative Action to her great disgust, her achievements have come with the price of sacrifice of her social life. Rice protects her private life obsessively enveloping her relationship(s) in multilayered stealth, while she is only ever seen in public in the company of her mother. Should Rice chose to marry in the next eighteen months, that will be a very clear signal that she will be at the top of the Republican ticket in 2008. Hillary’s political career is mottled. She began as a liberal avenger working on the Watergate Committee to throw the criminal Nixon administration out of power. She morphed into a corporate attorney when her husband was Governor of Arkansas, and she was labeled a flaming liberal for her attempts to bring a national health service to America. As New York’s Senator, she has moved back to the center-right of the spectrum flirting with the pro-life Democrats (conservative Roman Catholics) and the military for all of the good that it will do her (read: less than zero). Hillary has a long-standing relationship with the Democratic Leadership Council. In fact, her husband founded it. She is morphing into a chameleonesque political persona, but if she were to be elected (which I doubt), there is little doubt that Morris is right; she would preside as a liberal in the mold of FDR-JFK, and be a truly great president. Morris is undoubtedly right, too, about Rice. She is a dedicated true believer in the theory that has evolved around neoconservativism. Even though she has been a pawn of the petroleum industry for over a decade when she was appointed to the board of Chevron, she believes in the mission of PNAC – to deliver a century of American hegemony through military superiority, imperial expansion and geopolitical domination. Her innate hyper-Christianity feeds her philosophy. Her father was an Afro-American minister in Montgomery, Alabama and that means that she is: fundamentalist, Zionist, Islamophobic, Arabophobic and totalitarian. She has never had any sympathy with the civil rights movement. After her close friend, Denise McNair, was killed in a church bombing in Montgomery, Alabama, she did not lift one finger to aid the civil rights movement. Her family was Republican, and they simply did not support the work of Dr. Martin Luther King. They kept their place, and they trained their daughter to compete with the whites on their own terms. They studiously chose not to support social change. The Rice family fit Harry Belafonte’s pointed characterization of Colin Powell perfectly. For the privilege of serving in the biggest houses, they are more than willing to do the bidding of their masters and mistresses. That is why they are Republicans to this day. Condoleezza Rice has led Bible study groups in the West Wing and prayer groups aboard Air Force One. She is in position to sweep to power in January, 2009, where she will have the force of history at her back. As America’s first black and first woman president embodied in her person, Condoleezza Rice will be prepared to continue the wars of neocolonial aggression to deliver oil and power to America for her time in office. Ultimately, she will vie with the Bushes for the crown as America’s most disastrous president. She already deserves the title of “America’s Worst-ever Secretary of State.” Under Rice, America’s standing has fallen into the gutter. With her in the White House, it will fall lower, into the sewer and below that to the underground currents feeding into the molten core of the earth. With Condoleezza Rice in the Oval Office, the neocons will retain power into the foreseeable future. Sources
Mrs President
Rice Fails to Persuade
Russia to Support U.N. Action on Iran __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global public affairs organization based in the United Kingdom. He has appeared as a public affairs expert on the BBC, European Business News, NPR and many European television broadcasts examining American politics and culture. In addition to his column for The Political Junkies, he is a regular contributor to the Moving Planet weblog. See: www.planetarymovement.org and http://planetmove.blogspot.com/
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
