President Obama told Bloomberg TV last week that he still hasn’t made up his mind who should replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. That means the effort — conducted both in public and behind closed doors — to persuade him not to name U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice will intensify.
The public criticism is led by Republicans who say that Rice is too “political” a choice and that she may have deliberately misled the public before the November election about who was behind the Benghazi killings of U.S. personnel in September. The inside-baseball attacks on Rice are led by Democrats who view her as temperamental and opportunistic. If Susan Rice doesn’t become secretary of state, it may be less because of Benghazi than because she has angered too many liberals.
Being temperamental and opportunistic doesn’t normally attract criticism in Washington, D.C. — the whole town is full of type-A schemers. But many Democrats see Rice as a special case. Columnist Trudy Rubin, a den mother to liberal foreign-policy types, says that Rice “has established a reputation for brusqueness and bluster that raises real questions about her suitability for the job.” Dana Milbank of the Washington Post bluntly stated, “She is ill-equipped to be the nation’s top diplomat for reasons that have little to do with Libya.” Most damming, he concluded that “there likely aren’t enough Republican or Democratic votes in the Senate to confirm her.” National Journal’s Michael Hirsh quotes “a longtime foreign-policy expert who has worked for Democratic administrations” who says that Rice can’t handle disagreement: “Her voice is always right on the edge of a screech. You want somebody who has a sense of authority. It’s like [Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner at the beginning. He had no air of authority about him.”
Such quotes have prompted Rice defenders to cry foul. Emily Bazelon of Slate says the last quote “walks up to the line of sexism” and reminds her of anonymous attacks on Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor for being “kind of a bully on the bench.” But raising sexism as a factor in the criticism of Rice isn’t likely to fly. Many of her critics are women, and there is apparently no love lost between Rice and the person she is seeking to replace, Hillary Clinton. Michael Sneed of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that Clinton would prefer John Kerry to Rice, who is “not the friendliest person.” A “top White House source” told Sneed that Clinton’s recent praise of Rice for having done “a great job” was considered “underwhelming and tepid.”
Clinton supporters will also privately acknowledge that they haven’t forgotten that Rice, a State Department official in Bill Clinton’s administration, was one of the first former Clinton aides to jump ship in 2007 and endorse Barack Obama. Rice even attacked Hillary’s stances on Iraq and Iran, asking for an “explanation of how and why she got those critical judgments wrong.” “One thing you can be sure of is that the Clintons never forget disloyalty,” a source close to the Clintons tells me.
Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/susan-rice/2012/12/10/susan-rice-under-fire-democrats-being-temperamental-and-opportunistic?cmpid=NL_FiredUpFoxNation#ixzz2EflxWwav
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