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Rice Is a Uniquely Poor Choice for VP

The lone Condi Rice enthusiast in America blogs at Ricochet: It’s possible there has never been a more perfect, complementary candidate to round out the ticket in the history of the GOP. Condi Rice boosterism is just as flawed as the more familiar enthusiasms for Rubio and Ryan, but the difference is that almost everyone […]

The lone Condi Rice enthusiast in America blogs at Ricochet:

It’s possible there has never been a more perfect, complementary candidate to round out the ticket in the history of the GOP.

Condi Rice boosterism is just as flawed as the more familiar enthusiasms for Rubio and Ryan, but the difference is that almost everyone can see why the case for Rice as VP is non-existent. Rubio and Ryan enthusiasts have trendiness and novelty on their side, and there are fewer incentives for conservatives to notice their political and policy weaknesses. Virtually no one has talked about Condi Rice as a real political contender in the GOP for the last eight years, because it is such a far-fetched idea that it doesn’t come up very often. We knew that Mitch Daniels had given up on campaigning for the presidential nomination when he half-joked about choosing Rice as his running mate. I laid out the non-interventionist and realist indictment of Rice’s service in the Bush administration at the time:

As National Security Advisor, Rice did a terrible job. As Secretary of State, she didn’t do much better. Hers was the disastrous tenure at State that facilitated the election of Hamas in Gaza, the recognition of Kosovo’s independence, the push for missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and the dangerous, foolish push to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia. The last three of these contributed significantly to the escalation of tensions that led to the August 2008 war in Georgia. These were the results of administration decisions in which Rice was very much involved, and they were all clearly mistakes at the time. Under Bush’s direction, she helped drive the U.S.-Russian relationship to its lowest point in the last twenty years. She memorably commented on the 2006 bombardment of Lebanon as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

As much as anything, it was the Bush administration’s reputation for incompetence that drove Bush’s approval ratings to historic lows, and Rice contributed significantly to the administration’s incompetence in its conduct of foreign policy. In addition to her bad record and her lack of experience as an elected official, what makes Rice an unusually poor choice of running mate is that she manages to alienate a lot of other people in the Republican coalition at the same time. Neoconservatives dislike her almost as much as antiwar conservatives do, and pro-life activists would rebel against the mere suggestion of her selection.

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