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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Rice Delivers the RNC Speech Which Will Be Remembered

One after another we have heard the pundits' expectant intakes of breath, waiting to see who on the convention floor will give the speech that provides a glimpse of where the Republican Party will be in 2016 when it actually has a chance to pick up the pieces and find some kind of national relevance again (except as a wrecking crew). Chris Christie's inept bullying didn't cut it, Mike Huckabee's lame maundering didn't cut it, doll-eyed dolt Paul Ryan's petulant whining voice-changing Eddie Haskell impersonation definitely didn't cut it (modern media era VPs in losing tickets never get to the White House anyway). Quite unexpectedly, at any rate to me, was the realization that, whatever its errors and limitations, the speech providing the path out of the wilderness to the GOP would be the one delivered by Condoleezza Rice. Sure, it contained the necessary bullshit pretending Barack Obama doesn't support entrepreneurship or doesn't have a sufficiently tough foreign policy, but the overall tenor of Rice's speech was something like a Republican-approved hopey changey. Listening to the GOP howl in ecstasy over Rice's speech I can't help but feel that even the Republicans know they are completely out of touch with the reality of a secular multicultural America and they want some way to stop the merry-go-round they set in motion and find some way back into relevance. They are too infantile to actually concede their mistakes and engage as partners with our President in the good faith effort he endlessly welcomes to help solve our problems together, that would be too humiliating apparently, but they will cheer paeans to education and small business and diversity and immigration the substance of every idea of which is championed by our President in the face of their monolithic obstructionism now showered in adoration just because it is coming from the mouth of one of their own. The cries of "we love you, Condi!" coming from the hall finally seemed spontaneous and real. I personally find it hard to imagine Rice could really fail upward from her responsibility for some of the most unprecedented policy catastrophes of the history of our nation, but I suppose it is too much to hope that Republicans could ever change so much as to actually punish incumbent elites for their failures, and I must say I would welcome a 2016 Presidential contest pitting Hilary Clinton against Condoleezza Rice. You better believe I would be campaigning for Hilary, but I would be well pleased in general that the contest for the American Presidency actually looked so much like America does for once whatever the outcome.

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