<<...freezing rain on wings: likely cause, not Repub murder...>>
jw: you may be right...yet, anything's possible in this world we live in today. I'm still not convinced the former Enron Vice-Chairman committed suicide -- but 'the experts' claimed he did.
btw, here's an interesting, off-topic editorial by a well known columnist and writer...
The First Woman President: Hillary or Condi?
BY RICHARD REEVES
Universal Press Syndicate
October 24, 2002
PARIS -- Hillary Clinton turned 55 years old last Saturday. Condoleezza Rice turns 48 next month. So, they will be 61 and 53, respectively, when they run against each other for president in 2008. If they run for president.
I think they will. Three things are necessary to make a run: celebrity, which used to be called "name recognition," money and narrative, by which I mean a story to tell. There are other things that help, of course, desire and iron discipline among them. But Clinton and Rice have more than enough of those.
Clinton has the celebrity and the money. She is, in fact, now the greatest fundraiser in the Democratic Party, and has already passed out a million dollars this year to this year’s Democratic candidates for Congress and governorships. And she has kept more than that for herself in her own political action committee. Her scenario has George W. Bush winning re-election in 2004 against a sacrificial lamb or Gore. Then 2008 is a free year in both parties.
Clinton does, however, have a story problem. He’s just her Bill. The senator from New York has extraordinarily high negatives in voter polls, because millions of Americans hate her husband, former president Clinton, hate her, or hate them both.
Rice has the celebrity and the narrative. Money will follow. Like Clinton, she is a smart little girl who made good and the bigtime. But she did it without the help of a man.
The Condi Rice story is the one Americans want to believe. She grew up a little black girl, son a of a preacher and a schoolteacher, in the worst days of Birmingham, Alabama. "Bombing- ham" we called it when white trash placed bombs at the doorways of black churches and local cops loosed dogs and firehoses on teenagers and grandmothers. Good came out of that finally, and Rice was part of the good.
She did everything right. She learned the piano and figure-skating, graduated from high school at 15 and the University of Denver at 19, got her master’s degree at Notre Dame and went back to Denver to earn a doctorate. Her mentor there was Professor Joseph Korbel, a Czech immigrant, whose daughter, Madelyn, became Secretary of State under Hillary’s husband. Then, after doing some foreign policy thinking for a Democrat, Colorado Senator Gary Hart, she took a Republican trail to Stanford, the conservative Hoover Institution there, and the National Security Council of two Bush White Houses. And she served on the boards of directors of Chevron,Trasn-America and Hewlett-Packard, along with KQED, the National Public Radio station in San Francisco.
"My parents had me absolutely convinced," she says, "that,well,you may not be able to have a hamburger at Woolworth’s, but you can be President of the United States."
Rice’s scenario, which is being pushed by other people, has Vice President Cheney deciding not to run again in 2004, perhaps for health reasons. The replacement: Condoleezza Rice.
It could happen. She would deny it now and she might have to run for another office, probably in California, to get some experience in the endless series of small humiliations called campaigning. But she is a performer by nature, that’s what the piano and skating were about. When she was provost at Stanford, a big deal, she allowed George magazine to photograph her sweating, twisting, turning and lifting in what they called, "Condi’s Killer Workout."
Before that, after Hillary Clinton had totally screwed-up her husband’s plans for national health care legislation -- she was the Dick Cheney of 1993, doing everything in secret -- I wrote that the First Lady had the political instincts of a stone. No more. She polished up her act during a tough run for the Senate in New York and now she is so political that a lie-detector test could not pin down her position on things like war in Iraq.
These are ladies who learn. One of them will probably be the first woman president of the United States.
_______________________________________
RICHARD REEVES is the author of 12 books, including President Nixon: Alone in the White House. He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Esquire and dozens of other publications. E-mail him at rr@richardreeves.com.
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