Impressive Condi Rice

You have to read to the end – the very end – of this piece in the NY Times for what should probably (considering the headline) have been the lede. Still, Ms. Rice tells it:

Rice Defends Bush’s Race Record and Calls for Rebuilding Fairly

Ms. Rice spoke about a wide range of foreign policy issues, but seemed to speak most vehemently when she was asked what she told foreign leaders wondering about racial discrimination and poverty in the United States at a time when the Bush administration was promoting democracy around the world.

“You go to any other meeting around the world and show me the kind of diversity that you see in America’s cabinet, in America’s Foreign Service, in America’s business community, in America’s journalistic community,” Ms. Rice said. “Show me that kind of diversity anyplace else in the world, and I’m prepared to be lectured to about race.”

When talking to foreigners about the hurricane victims, Ms. Rice said, she tells them: “Yes, we have a problem when race and poverty come together. We really do. It’s a vestige of our history. It’s a vestige of the Old South in this case. But don’t misread that there has been no progress on issues of race in America.”

Ms. Rice, who was born and spent her childhood in Birmingham, Ala., and who flew to Mobile two weekends ago to visit hurricane victims, rarely ventures into domestic political matters but has spoken many times over the last 10 days of those affected as victims of generations of poverty and racial discrimination.

“This is a part of the country I’m from,” Ms. Rice said. “It is a place where there are pockets – by no means all of the Old South, but pockets – where race and poverty come together in a very ugly way.”

But Ms. Rice rejected as “poisonous” any suggestion that President Bush himself would discriminate racially against any victims of the hurricane and said that his record on education, including aid to historically black colleges and the setting of standards for schoolchildren, demonstrated that he believed passionately in racial equality.

“I find it very strange to think that people would think that the president of the United States would sit deciding who ought to be helped on the basis of color, most especially this president,” she said. “What evidence is there that this is the case? Why would you say such a thing?”

Ms. Rice said she was first impressed by Mr. Bush in the 1990’s, not because of any foreign policy issues, but because he spoke of “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and the phrase meant something to her. She recalled being told by a high school teacher “that maybe I was junior college material” and added:

“I know about the soft bigotry of low expectations. And it’s not in this president. It is, however, deeply ingrained in our system, and we’re going to have to do something about it.”

Unfortunately, for some, the words and testimony from a black woman who grew up in the segregated south and was playmates with a little girl eventually killed by a white racist bomber, will ring hollow, simply because anyone defending President Bush on any matter must be immediately and summarily dismissed.

But I think the majority of Americans…and those few remaining sensible people in the press…understand that a charge of “racism” levelled against this president is simply a scurrilous and champertous connivance. And I do believe it is time for those few sensible members of the fourth estate to use the power of their pens to start talking down this disgusting, unhelpful and truly slanderous meme.