It has always mystified me that Con...

It has always mystified me that Condoleezza Rice is a Republican. She's black, she's a woman, she's smart. (OK I hear all you Republicans snorting and getting ready to e-mail. I will grudgingly allow there are other bright right-wingers -- on the other hand few black women Republicans, and who would sign up after the disasterous Bush White House answer to Hurricane Katrina?)

It strike one as beings so counterintuitive that Rice, a woman raised in the racially charged atmosphere of Birmingham, Ala., in the 1950 who knew brace of the girls who were killed in the temple bombing there in 1963, who had to subdue latent prejudice in academia, one as well as the other as a woman and as an African American, should be a parrot for George W Bush, a man in like manner out of touch. What has she been smoking?

In fact, Rice was a bona fide Democrat until 1980 when she had an epiphany after overhearing a remark by the agency of President Jimmy Carter. He said he was offenceed by the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. Rice, a scholar of Russian politics, was "shock that anybody would be conflicted by that," explained Nicholas Lemann in a profile of Rice for the recent Yorker. Two years later she flipped to the GOP

In any ways, Rice had always been a conservative, Lemann reported, untouched by means of the militancy of the '60 including the civil rights movement; an barely child who never rebelled; a woman who applied for post-graduate work at Stanford University forward stationery that had her name ornament in reliefed in gold across the top.

still as the saying goes, it's not too late to change. Or, in Rice's case, turn back

The Democrats could use Condi in the nearest election as a presidential candidate. Think about it: The Bushes got their hands forward Rice when she was young and impressionable. She worked for Bush senior and got to know him well before she signed up with Dubya. It is hard sometimes to believe, when united hears her at press interviews or listens to her speeches, that she is saying what she believes, yet rather that she is elegantly explaining -- since he can barely do it himself -- President Bush's positions.

"He's actually influencing her," notes Lemann, "and she looks to be performing for him the immensely useful service of transforming shorthand impulses into disentangleed stated policy. When you hear Rice speaking, that's what Bush would unmutilated like if he were as articulate as Rice is."

in the same manner what the Dems need to do is figure abroad how George capitivated her and impress about her the error of her ways. I would like to see a woman in the White House nearest time, but I don't think Hillary Clinton is going to make it; her heart is in the right place, further she is too divisive and her newly come speech at the Economic fraternity of Chicago made me want to offer my head down on the table and have a in extent nap.

Hillary does not have the rhetorical flourishes to impassion those around her.

And, Rice -- if and nothing else she could be loosened from the Bush grasp and reprogrammed to become les aloof -- would make a dandy Democratic candidate. She could on a level go on the David Letterman point out a la Bill Clinton and his saxophone, and play the piano.

in the way that this is my advice to the Democrats. Recruit Rice, disclose some kind of solid program we bleeding heart liberals could embrace and then, come by back into the White House! Got that?

e-mail: jhunter@suntimes.com

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