Secretary of state: Is Rice right for the job?

last updated 8 January 2015

The last thing Susan Rice deserves is a promotion, said Jeffrey Taylor in Politico.com. President Obama seems determined to nominate the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, even though Rice recently “flat-out misled the American people” about the Benghazi terrorist attacks. In the days after the deadly al Qaida–led assault on the U.S. Consulate in that Libyan city, Rice repeatedly characterized the attacks as a “spontaneous” riot triggered by an anti-Islamic video made in the U.S. She was either naïvely passing on a cover-up created by the White House, or knowingly hiding the truth about what everyone now admits was a planned terrorist assault. Republicans are now in full rebellion at the prospect of a Rice nomination, with Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham vowing to filibuster it in the Senate, and 97 House members writing to Obama to say she has “caused irreparable damage to her credibility both at home and around the world.”

Actually, Rice is more than qualified for this job, said Joan Walsh in Salon.com. She’s a Rhodes scholar and gifted diplomat who, as U.N. ambassador, succeeded in the almost impossible task of getting the world to back tougher sanctions on Iran. There’s absolutely no evidence that she did anything wrong on Benghazi. In fact, it’s now clear that she based her early statements on talking points handed to her by the intelligence agencies. The other rap on Rice—surfacing in unattributed quotes—is that she’s brusque and aggressive, and can grate on both colleagues and foreign diplomats. Successful, ambitious women always face this sort of criticism. And in case anyone hasn’t noticed, while the secretary of state needs diplomatic skills, the job of negotiating with Russia, China, Iran, et al “doesn’t require a doormat.”

Both Obama and Senate Republicans now must make a high-stakes political calculation, said Jay Newton-Small in Time.com. If Obama nominates Rice, Republicans will use her hearings to examine whether Obama “dropped the ball in Benghazi” and thus cost four Americans their lives. Rice, meanwhile, will be forced to testify under oath as to what she knew about terrorist involvement, and when. Republicans face a different problem: They just got clobbered in an election because they alienated women and minorities. If McCain et al now gang up on Rice, “do they really want the image of old white guys hectoring an African-American woman?”