April 7, 2004
INTERNATIONAL WOMAN OF MYSTERY:
INSIDE CONDI'S PRIVATE WORLD (Deborah Orin, April 7, 2004, NY Post)
Condi Rice is a true Renaissance woman: a classical pianist, a fanatical football fan, and so fluent in Russian that she's read "War and Peace" in the language in which Tolstoy wrote it.Twice.
But in many ways, the most powerful woman in the world - the most powerful black woman ever - remains a mystery to many in Washington.
[E]ven in her high-profile job she has faced the embarrassment of having a sales clerk in a fancy store show her costume jewelry instead of the real thing and mutter something like "black trash" when she asked to see the real gold.
"And so I said, 'Let's get one thing clear. If you could afford anything in here you wouldn't be behind this counter. So I strongly suggest you do your job,' " Rice recounted to Essence magazine. [...]
She was an only child whose parents groomed her for greatness.
Her father, John, was a teacher and ordained minister, and her music-loving mother, Angelena, chose her unusual name from "con dolcezza," Italian for "with sweetness" as a direction for playing music, then modified it to Condoleezza.
She remembers the 1963 white segregationist firebombing of a Baptist church in her hometown just two weeks after Martin Luther King's "I have a dream speech." She knew two of the four girls who were killed.
She first performed classic piano in public at age 4. She skipped both first and seventh grades, graduated from high school at 15 and from the University of Denver at 19.
At 38, she was Stanford provost - the No. 2 job - and she first worked at the National Security Council for Bush's father.
She dreamed of being a classical pianist, but decided she wasn't good enough and fell in love with politics.
In 2002, she played a duet with star cellist Yo-Yo Ma when he got a National Medal of the Arts.
It was Ma's idea.
Football fan? Scratch her from the VP short list... Posted by Orrin Judd at April 7, 2004 1:28 PM
She just jumped to the top of my 2008 wish list with that admission. :)
Posted by: kevin whited at April 7, 2004 1:47 PMI want someone like this for my daughter-in-law.
Posted by: Mike Morley at April 7, 2004 2:06 PMI remember once reading that one of her dream jobs was to be commissioner of the NFL. Got to love a woman like that.
Posted by: mc at April 7, 2004 2:12 PMDaughter-in-law heck. I want someone like this for my President!
Posted by: Joe Shockley at April 7, 2004 2:33 PMFootball fan? Better than soccer.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at April 7, 2004 2:37 PMI really do wonder if our boy has something up his sleeve tomorrow. I won't quote odds, but there is a possibility that she could smash this thing out of the park. (Look for Ollie North comparisons if she does. Who heard of him before? Who DOESN'T know who he is now, even though a decade and a half later, all he's really done is some punditry and lost one election.)
If Condi goes up there and takes the offensive, shows off what we all like about her, and looks like the eptitome of the assured modern black professional woman... watch out.
I even dream that, as she has basically expressed zero interest in higher office (executive at least), that she is so personally pissed off at Clarke and that certain party that is using him to attack her honor that she'll ask to bump Cheney just to crush her enemies, and give a primordial howl over their broken bodies.
Heh. Imagery much?
Posted by: Andrew X at April 7, 2004 2:56 PMShe is a die hard Cleveland Browns fan so I must follow her to ends of the Earth!
Posted by: BJW at April 7, 2004 3:23 PM
Bush/Rice '08
Posted by: RoboDruid at April 7, 2004 3:50 PMShe's a southerner OJ, she has football fanatacism in her genes. I married the only southerner who doesn't care about football.
Posted by: Jeff at April 7, 2004 4:15 PMI'm with OJ, or DC, or whoever it was that said a few days ago, (basically) this could be the quintessential "briar patch" moment for our esteemed colleagues across the aisle.
As to a love of football [sic] instead of soccer [sic], Raoul, indeed the woman IS mortal. The opposite would spark debates of a true angel among us.
Clarke was obviously outclassed for the last 3 years. What a tiny little man. Fits right in with Clinton's cabinet and didn't even make it there. But he's skulking his way to the bank with his 2 million in royalties for retirement. What else counts with scuzballs?
Posted by: genecis at April 7, 2004 10:02 PMMy Scots father had no use for American football. None of his four sons gives a damn about the American version (or even the British). The only one in the family who likes it is my niece. By age 12, she had grown men listening to her pre-game analysis and prediction, with obviously no influence from the males in the family. So I understand that it is entirely possible for females to have an authentic and unfeigned interest in a boring game.
Nonetheless, I am puzzled at to why her interest in football should preclude Dr Rice's presence on the short list (or am I missing a sarcastic tone to the remark?)
Posted by: bernard hassan at April 8, 2004 12:05 AMBernard,
I think oj misunderstood it to mean 'soccer'. That would be a problem...
Posted by: at April 8, 2004 2:19 AMGreat link. I've posted longer commentary at my site.
The NFL is too great a national treasure valued by too many citizens to have Rice just walk in to it. A VP stint, followed by a presidential one, will reassure our "racist, bigoted" culture that she's up to the task.
/sarcasm
Posted by: Ptah at April 8, 2004 6:37 AMWhat has OJ's panties in a wad is the fact that she is not a baseball fan first.
In this instance hostility to poufters in satin shorts that fall down and grab their ankle anytime someone so much as sneezes near them is irrelevant (though entirely justified).
Posted by: Jason Johnson at April 8, 2004 11:15 AMFurther proof that the classic list of differences between Southerners and northerners regarding the superior sport of football is entirely accurate. The pertinent example:
Fathers:
NORTH: Expect their daughters to understand Sylvia Plath.
SOUTH: Expect their daughters to understand pass interference.
http://www.inhis.com/HumorNew/humor.aspx?id=9744
My complaint about Condi: she can watch the NFL without falling asleep. Get with it, Dr. Rice; every self-respecting Alabamian knows that college football makes the No Fun League look like a seminar on navel lint (and that Auburn University is superior to uat in every conceivable way, of course).
Posted by: Will Collier at April 8, 2004 2:30 PM