Condi in the Big Chair. Todd Purdum ends yesterday's big, wet kiss to Condoleeza Rice on her imminent ascension to the State Department (hopefully headlined "As Rice Prepares to Move Up, Diplomacy May Be on Rise, Too") with an anonymously hopeful quote:

If Ms. Rice's management of the several dozen members of the National Security Council was not always seen as effective, her skills in running a huge bureaucracy will be tested in ways that even the powerful provost's post at Stanford did not. But at least one senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed optimism.

"I think," the official said, "we have a sense that we're at a moment in history with the president's agenda of fighting terrorism, building democracy, but also re-establishing relations with allies and dealing with the Middle East, when we feel like we're going to fit in."

Awwww ... Who knew that Foggy Bottom had become the Island of Misfit Toys?

Part of an informal pre-inauguration series of A1 pieces in which the Times strives to flatter the self-mythologizing of the Big Repubs, Purdum's article is a farrago of wishful pieties, with hardly enough substance in it to make good fish wrapping. Writing in a tone of pie-eyed innocence, Purdum worries with every appearance of seriousness at the question—none "looms larger" as Rice faces confirmation, he says—of "just what kind of secretary of state Ms. Rice will be." Only friends and bipartisan well-wishers are invited to this party; "critics" are given a single, two-sentence paragraph early in the piece to say their worst of her NSC tenure—a paragraph plus a sentence, if you count Purdum's belated, glancing refrence to that half-forgotten little tussle over terrorism preparedness that Richard Clark started last summer. (A few of us, not Todd obviously, still remember Condi squirming at having to speak the title of that unfortunate August 6 PDB.) None of which matters, we're asked to believe, because even in the worst case past is not prolog here: Purdum closes out every major division of the article with a fetishistic tribute to the transformative power of the Big Chair that Condi inherits, with the most egregious saved for last:

"Her role will be different institutionally, as well as practically," said the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr. No longer will she be expected to summarize the views of others, but to state her own ...

"I think we can expect her to be a strong, visible, articulate secretary of state who is going to do her best to function as the administration's chief foreign policy spokesman ... She's going to be more reflective, she's going to be more expressive, she's going to stake out positions in ways she's felt constrained from doing." [quoting Condi's friend Coit D. Blacker] ...

"One of the true maxims of Washington is that where you sit is where you stand," said [David] Rothkopf, who interviewed Ms. Rice for his [forthcoming history of the National Security Council]. "She will soon find that instead of being surrounded by people in the White House who are thinking about the president's agenda all the time, she's surrounded by career Foreign Service officers in a massive bureaucracy that has its own agenda and its own traditions.

"She's also a nice person, an open person, who will listen to those people, and be changed by them. And sooner or later, many of the State Department's initiatives will begin having her imprint, and she's going to have pride of authorship."

Why Purdum or his editors think that well-meaning pap like this can pass muster as genuine analysis is beyond me—or would be, if I thought they thought that genuine analysis was being perpetrated here. This is mere dues-paying, more evidence of the depths to which the Times' self-respect (at least the self-respect of the Washington bureau) has sunk under the current regime. Rice, following administration protocol, "declined to be interviewed for this article," Purdum admits in his second graf: on the outs with the powers that be, the Times begs for mercy like a whipped puppy.

And what might the naysayers say, if Purdum allowed them to say any nays? Well, how about connecting the dots from Seymour Hersh's new piece in the New Yorker on the second term's Rumsfeld Ascendancy and the consequent utter militarization of American foreign policy? Condi goes to State precisely as Porter Goss went to the CIA—less as a department head than as Dubya's proconsul. Her charge isn't to advocate for, or from, the State bureaucracy—it's to neutralize it, to keep it out of Rummy's faith-based way as he gets his next few wars on. With or without Hersh's reporting, it can't be clearer that that's what Dear Leader has in mind. How likely is it that Condi's loyalty to her hubby's going to wane just because she no longer has a desk in the White House?

Is there any chance that Todd Purdum isn't aware of this, or that with a little effort he couldn't have found somebody with a reputation to say it? To offer an actual critical perspective on the institutional politics, and what might be expected from Secretary of State Rice? Of course not. It's just that any such commentary would have violated the craven decorums by which the Times, when it comes to Bush and his gang, now instinctively operates.

posted by michael  3:44:20 PM  
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