The fact that the GOP nomination process has come down to Newt and Mitt is hard enough to take. But this is all I can takes and I can’t takes no more. Especially not this…
America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.
After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.
The pro-life credentials of Mitt (who says he has changed) and Newt (equivocates on ESCR) are already suspect. Condi’s opinion is not. She is pro-choice.
Asked, “Are you pro-life? Are you pro-choice? What is your thought on abortion?”, Rice responded: “I believe if you go back to 2000, when I helped the president in the campaign, I said that I was, in effect, kind of Libertarian on this issue, and meaning by that that I have been concerned about a government role in this issue. I’m a strong proponent of parental choice, of parental notification. I’m a strong proponent of a ban on late-term abortion. These are all things that I think unite people and I think that that’s where we should be. I’ve called myself at times mildly pro-choice.
With little prompting Rice continued, “Yeah, mildly pro-choice. That’s what that means. I think that there are a lot of things that we can unite around, and that’s where I would tend to be. I’m very comfortable with the president’s view that we have to respect and need to have a culture that respects life. This should be an issue pretty infrequently because we ought to have a culture that says that, ‘Who wants to have an abortion? Who wants to see a daughter or a friend or, you know, a sibling go through something like that?’ And so I believe the president has been in exactly the right place about this, which is, we have to respect the culture of life and we have to try and bring people to have respect for it and make this as rare a circumstance as possible.”
Babies don’t get mildly dead. They get all the way dead. Whoever the GOP nominee is, they better pick somebody to the right of the Pope on life issues. If they pick Condi, they can count me out. I will be nobody’s pawn.
December 19, 2011 at 4:15 am
That's depressing. The GOP is finally showing its colors. All these years, they've been stringing pro-life along, while conveniently finding reasons not to push the matter. And now when it looks like the momentum is swinging our way, the Repubs become as verbally soft as they've been in action. So The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named is right: We have the Stupid Evil Party and the Other Stupid Evil Party.
December 19, 2011 at 5:21 am
Gee, we've known that in Vermont for a very long time. We've managed twice to have a Republican Lt. Gov. who's very pro-life, but even when the Gov. was Republican as well he was not pro-life. Yet Right to Life supported these candidates as "strategic votes." Sure, it was strategic, it was the whole plan of the Republican party to get our votes so they could push their other agendas (like being in bed with Monsanto).
December 19, 2011 at 6:57 am
Hmm. I do think that whomever wins the nomination (and yes I do think it has come down to the depressing Newt vs Mitt choice) will pick a woman. My sister, who follows these things much more closely than I do, swears it will be Kelly Ayotte from NH.
December 19, 2011 at 8:46 am
If she's veep, I truly don't care about her stance. Let her do her foreign policy thing. What matters is that the pres is truly pro-life, and makes appointments (!!!) accordingly. Which rules out Romney in my book. I think the guy is about as pro-life as Bush I, which is to say, just pro-life enough to get us suckers to vote for him.
December 19, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Of the declared Republican candidates, I would choose any of them over Obama.
December 19, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Condi Rice has as much a chance of being the VP selection as I do. I honestly don't think there is much to worry about here. One article discussing how she's positioning herself to be the Veep doesn't mean it's likely to happen.
December 19, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Draft Christopher Henry Smith, long time Republican representative from New Jersey who worked with Henry Hyde, advocate of human rights, especially the right to life, or Chris Christie, Gov. of New Jersey, and former attorney General. The "Right to Choose" voter has marginalized himself. Their vote is unnecessary.
December 19, 2011 at 2:18 pm
"My parents always voted Democratic". "She's a woman" "He's a black man" There is no "Right to Choose" unless there is LIFE, so to be an abortion advocate, one must first be a right to life advocate. Who will tell Planned Parenthood that their plane ony has one wing?
December 19, 2011 at 2:20 pm
Way to go Snoopy. The Bloody Red Baron, aka Planned Parenthood has no right to life.
December 19, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Could she have given a longer answer to a simple question? Was she filibustering herself? And her logic that we should only unite around things we're already united around shows a tremendous lack of deep thinking. He Condi, should we have only gone into wars that we all could have united around?
That said, it's hard to claim that her positives outweigh her negatives. Her only positive is the racial/sexual identity angle that conservatives hate. Her negatives: She's tied at the hip to an unpopular president, her foreign policy experience was not so glittering, she is pro-abortion (pro-choice is a poor euphemism for murdering babies), and she did a poor job at the State Department (her job was to clean out the lifelong bureaucrats who undermine US policy; they outlasted her).
December 19, 2011 at 6:12 pm
This is just an indication that they're floating names around. The VP pick won't be Condi. The list of negatives out weigh any positives.
December 19, 2011 at 9:37 pm
My first thought was, well, she's lobbying for the position of Secretary of State, not Dept of HHS.
Then, I took another minute to think about it, and realized that as SoS, she would be in a position to influence American policy about China's denial of human rights, the Mideast position on women's rights, and other connected issues.
She's out – her position reveals that she would be persuadable on issues, and willing to compromise principle for a tactical edge.