Romney: Tempted by Condoleeza, the Female and Black Votes

In the dead water of the pre–electoral American summer her name drops like a stone: here she comes, “Condi” to her friends, “Leeza” to Gadhafi, who worshipped her in a secret album with dozens of pictures of her.

Condoleeza Rice swoops on to save Mitt Romney’s pale candidacy. In the empty political season which goes from the end of the primary elections’ orgasm to the conventions at the end of August and September — when Americans prefer the weekends’ languor over the political dumb–shows — the name of Condoleeza Rice as possible vice–president is an evident operation to draw some attention on Mitt Romney, in crisis in the polls against Obama. In fact, her name is launched by a right-wing website: traditional, Republican and anti-Obama propaganda engine machine, the Drudge Report, famous for sensational scoops (it anticipated the Lewinsky case) and equally sensational blunders (it triumphantly announced that Obama’s health care reform was rejected by the Supreme Court).

The name of the aged, very prepared and very reserved Professor of Stanford University has presumably and forcefully entered the “short list” of four or five characters that the winner of the Republican primary elections, Mitt Romney drew — not only for her stellar resume, but for the obvious, even too obvious, function of “twofer” (like they secretly say in the cynical slang of the staff offices), a person who does for two and covers the necessity of hiring a woman and an African American, at the price of one.

Romney, the man of the establishment, of the financial caste the Republican electors put up with, like the good families young ladies used to bend to the husband picked for interest, is still unloved. “Condi” could be the spark capable of provoking, if not passion, at least some thrills of sympathy. But even with all her formidable academic preparation, her praiseworthy personal and professional history in the government at the highest levels, the now almost 60-year-old daughter of the deepest and most scowling South (she was born in 1954) has never been the type of person capable of stirring passion and enthusiasm. She’s always repeated she’s never wanted electoral jobs, which force everybody to electoral campaigns and “beauty pageants.” She even refused to run for student body president at her university in Denver, where her father, John Wesley Rice, a teacher and minister of the Presbyterian church, was vice principal. Even in this case, she denies an interest, like many future vice-presidents have done before her. In a life dedicated to what she herself defined as “overachievement,” going beyond expectations, Rice, goaded by her piano teacher mother (who chose her name from the Italian musical language, “Con Dolcezza”), was condemned very young to the life of the “know-it-all.”

Pianist and concert performer for the audience at six, like Mozart, but without his talent (she says she played well, but she wasn’t a pianist), competition ice skater, schoolgirl who would attend two classes at a time, always impeccably dressed even before discovering, as an adult, her beloved Armani suits, the little girl grown in the horrid, segregationist melting-pot of Birmingham, Alabama, knew that, being a black girl, she had no choice but being the best to be considered human. Two of the girls mauled by the KKK’s bomb in a church in Birmingham were her schoolmates. The rest of her life, on the wave of apparently unfeminine studies and specializations (her passion for the Cold War and her Ph.D. thesis about an arcane, super specialized topic — the relationship between the Czech regime and the armies) developed, for decades, in the light of the press. She left the Democratic Party and became a Republican. At Stanford University in 1985, where she taught, she was noticed by General Brent Scowcroft, who would become one of the most important strategic “consigliores” of Bush (father and son) at the White House. He brought her to Washington. Always unmarried, and therefore banally associated with rumors that say that every authoritative and single woman is a lesbian, her rise began. Extreme left-wing websites (which hate her) joined her to a colleague of Stanford, the documentary filmmaker Randy Bean, but the couple — “Rice and Bean” — looked more an Internet ridiculousness operation than serious news.

When interviewed during a talk show, she cut it short, saying that she simply never found either a man to marry or reasons to have kids. Her highest gratifications, so far, have been the jobs at the White House for George the Younger, whose foreign policy she baby-sat. She became counselor for national security and then Secretary of State, the second woman in charge of that, after Madeleine Albright, and the second person with African origins, after Colin Powell. The hypothesis that she could be the victim designated by Mitt Romney for his “ticket” in the electoral tandem is fascinating, if a bit desperate. The attempt to gain approval among the electors least favorable to the Republicans, women and African Americans, with the twofer woman (buy one get two) is way too impudent, but in policy obviousness often pays off.

In the summer, everything is supposable without big risks; the name of the woman Gadhafi adored (“Leeza, my Leeza”, he noted down at the bottom of the pages of his photo albums found by the rebels) and D’Alema didn’t dislike is a name, like any other, and makes people talk. She can’t demand an aircraft carrier baptized with her name yet (like her mentor, George Bush the Older), but Chevron dedicated a supertanker to her, the “SS Condoleeza Rice.” Its tonnage is 165,000 tons, a little too many for a woman who keeps a perfect figure.