Thursday, June 15, 2006

Rice's star power

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s address to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting yesterday was remarkable. By turns funny, inspiring, autobiographical, and passionate, it was as good an illustration of any of why Rice’s name keeps surfacing on wish-lists of presidential candidates.

Not many people in American politics, after all, can tell a story like this:

“Now, I am a Presbyterian. But I want to tell you why I'm a Presbyterian. I trace the roots of my faith back to my granddaddy. Granddaddy Rice was a poor sharecropper's son in Eutaw, Alabama. That's E-u-t-a-w, Alabama. And one day he decided he was going to get book learning, so he asked where a colored man could go to college. And they told him that there was this little school called Stillman College. It was about 60 miles away from where he lived and he could go to Stillman College and get an education. So Granddaddy Rice saved up his tuition, saved up his cotton, and he went off to school and he finished his first year, and they said, ‘Well, that's very good. Now how are you going to pay for your second year?’ And he said, ‘Well, I'm fresh out of cotton.’ And they said, ‘Well, you'll have to leave.’

“And he said, ‘Well, how are those boys going to college?’ And they said, ‘Well, they have what's called a scholarship. And if you wanted to be a Presbyterian minister, then you could have a scholarship, too.’ Well, my granddaddy said, ‘You know, that's exactly what I had in mind.’ And my family has been college educated and Presbyterian ever since.”

Rice offered a stirring defense of the administration’s freedom-oriented foreign policy, which was to be expected, but she also emphasized the important point that democracy and freedom are essential because human beings – and human societies – are flawed:

“Finally, more than anything, let us resolve to deal with the world as it is, but never to accept that we are powerless to make it better than it is. Not perfect, but better.

“America will lead will lead the cause of freedom in our world, not because we think ourselves perfect. To the contrary, we cherish democracy and champion its ideals because we know ourselves to be imperfect. With a long history of failures and false starts that testify to our own fallibility. After all, when our Founding Fathers said ‘We the people’, they didn't mean me. My ancestors in Mr. Jefferson's Constitution were three-fifths of a man. And it's only in my lifetime that America has guaranteed the right to vote for all our citizens. But we have made progress and we are striving toward a more perfect union.”

According to the Washington Post, Rice's speech was interrupted repeatedly by applause, including seven standing ovations. I never quite understood the aura of hero worship that surrounded Colin Powell, but there’s no mistaking the star power of his successor.

Posted by Jeff Jacoby at 10:33 AM

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