The Daily Background

Blah blah blah, Condi Rice won’t run for President… who cares. We already knew this anyways. People ask if America is ready for a male African American President (Barack Obama), and yet nobody seemed to ask if America was ready for a female African American President. Forget America– the Republican party isn’t ready for an African American for their nominee.

Seriously though, we already knew Rice wasn’t running since she’s shown exactly zero interest in doing anything other than what she’s doing (and those of us who have read State of Denial already know that she may not be even that interested in doing what she’s doing in the first place… She wanted to leave the Administration and resign as NSC after President Bush won his re-election campaign- Bush promoted her to SecState instead).

And she’s even said several times that she has zero interest in running for President and doesn’t understand why people (Republicans and less informed media pundits) keep floating her name. Why? Because there is this sense that the Republican party has to ‘out-do’ the Democrats when it comes to party diversity.

There is no question that the Democratic party is far, far more diverse than the GOP (partially this has to do with the fact that the Democratic party is larger in size, but there is also a far more diverse array of people in the Democratic party as well). But some Republicans are convinced that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee in ‘08 and they feel like they have to ‘out-do’ Dems and nominate not only a woman (for the sheer sake of being a woman), but also an African American. Oooh, wouldn’t that be just the most amazing show of party diversity, they think.

Never mind the fact that women vote for Democrats much more often than they typically do for Republicans. The idea of nominating Rice was just a wet-dream of diversity for diversity’s sake.

Never mind the fact that African Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic (after hurricane Katrina Bush’s approval among African Americans was something like 2% in one poll), and never mind the fact that Condi “the civil rights movement didn’t really effect me” Rice is hardly your typical African American (and she grew up in Birmingham Alabama of all places– how can you not be effected by the civil rights movement growing up during it in Birmingham?! Well, she was one of the best well-off African American families in the town and was ‘too busy’ in her own words with being trained as a classical pianist, to bother with or even pay attention to the struggle for equality. This, at a time and a place where her classmates were joining their families in protests downtown and getting sprayed with high-powered fire-hoses and attacked by Birmingham Police dogs).

I guess that dumbass (a right-winger by the way) who wrote the “Condi vs Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race” is feeling awfully silly right now. But not as silly as whatever publisher picked up that piece of shit and decided to do a hardcover printing of it.

Filed under: Presidential election, Z-TDB Blog