User:Informant16/sandbox/Condoleezza Rice

Nomination
On November 16, 2004, Bush nominated Rice to be Secretary of State. On January 26, 2005, the Senate confirmed her nomination by a vote of 85–13. The negative votes, the most cast against any nomination for Secretary of State since 1825, came from Senators who, according to Senator Barbara Boxer, wanted "to hold Dr. Rice and the Bush administration accountable for their failures in Iraq and in the war on terrorism." Their reasoning was that Rice had acted irresponsibly in equating Saddam's regime with Islamist terrorism and some could not accept her previous record. Senator Robert Byrd, a prominent Senate institutionalist who was concerned with executive over-reach, voted against Rice's appointment, indicating that she "has asserted that the President holds far more of the war power than the Constitution grants him."

Tenure
As Secretary of State, Rice championed the expansion of democratic governments and other American values: "American values are universal." "An international order that reflects our values is the best guarantee of our enduring national interest..." Rice stated that the September 11 attacks in 2001 were rooted in "oppression and despair" and so, the U.S. must advance democratic reform and support basic rights throughout the greater Middle East.

Rice also reformed and restructured the department, as well as U.S. diplomacy as a whole. "Transformational Diplomacy" is the goal that Rice describes as "work[ing] with our many partners around the world ... [and] build[ing] and sustain[ing] democratic, well-governed states that will respond to the needs of their people and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system."

As Secretary of State, Rice traveled heavily and initiated many diplomatic efforts on behalf of the Bush administration; she holds the record for most miles logged in the position. Her diplomacy relied on strong presidential support and is considered to be the continuation of style defined by former Republican secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James Baker. She was noted for her close relationship to Bush. The Los Angeles Times wrote, "Rice’s ability to become an almost clone-like extension of the president -- to understand what he wants, to make her only agenda his agenda and to carry out his wishes with unfailing loyalty -- has made her invaluable."

In February 2005, amid her first trip abroad as Secretary, Rice told reporters that the United States would confront Iran in "a variety of ways" with "a variety of different partners" to thwart its nuclear weapon plans, support for Islamic extremism, Iraq intervention, and violations of human rights. At a March 2006 congressional hearing, Rice warned, "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran, whose policies are directed at developing a Middle East that would be 180 degrees different than the Middle East we would like to see developed." On June 1, 2007, amid reports that members of Cheney's staff had told others that the vice president viewed a diplomatic track with Iran as pointless and was seeking to persuade Bush to confront Iran militarily, Rice affirmed diplomacy as the policy supported by the entire administration. In a June 2008 speech to AIPAC, Rice said of Iran, "We would be willing to meet with them but not while they continue to inch toward nuclear weapons under the cover of talks.”



In April 2005, Rice went to Russia to meet President Vladimir Putin. On the plane trip over, she related comments critical of Russia's democratic progress to reporters. "Trends have not been positive on the democratic side," said Rice. "There have been some setbacks, but I do still think there is a considerable amount of individual freedom in Russia, which is important." In late 2005, there was a dispute between Russia and Ukraine after Russia decided to quadruple the price of energy being provided to the Ukrainian market (Ukraine was receiving heavily subsidized prices for gas from Russia, the increase would have made the price equal to that of the current market price). Rice subsequently criticised Russia's actions, accusing Russia of using its gas wealth as a political weapon. She called on Russia to behave as a responsible energy supplier and stated that the act did not show the international community "that it is now prepared to act ... as an energy supplier in a responsible way."

In October 2006, Rice asserted that although “the diplomatic path is open” for North Korea, the country's decision to continue its nuclear program meant it would face “international condemnation and international sanctions unlike anything that they have faced before.” Later that month, Rice worked with allies to pass a UN Security Council resolution against North Korea that demanded North Korea destroy all of its nuclear weapons,  Rice hailing both the resolution as "the toughest sanctions on North Korea that have ever been imposed" and the unanimous passage of its sanctions, which even North Korean–friendly China supported. Nobel Laureate and cold-war nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling criticized Rice for organizing a punitive response, when she should have encouraged Taiwan, South Korea and Japan to reaffirm the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

In September 2008, Rice traveled to Libya to meet with Muammar Gaddafi, becoming the highest-ranking American official to visit the country since then-Vice President Richard Nixon in 1957. Rice stated that her meeting with Gaddafi entailed "learning from the lessons of the past" and "the importance of moving forward. The United States, I've said many times, doesn't have any permanent enemies." In her memoir, Rice wrote that Gaddafi "had a slightly eerie fascination with me personally" and that she left the meeting "realizing how much Gaddafi lives inside his own head, in a kind of alternate reality." When Gaddafi's Bab al-Azizia compound was later seized by rebel fighters in 2011, they found an album filled with photos of Rice giving speeches.

Post–Bush administration
After the end of the Bush Administration, Rice returned to academia and joined the Council on Foreign Relations.

Public appearances and commentary
In October 2010, Rice met with President Obama for a discussion on national security issues. In November, Rice participated in the groundbreaking of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. Two years later, Rice introduced world leaders such as Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar at the center's dedication ceremony.

In May 2011, after the killing of Osama bin Laden, Rice told Zain Verjee that bin Laden's death was "gratifying because for our country this brings an important chapter to a close and it shows that the United States can, with patience and persistence, do something like this." She argued against removing troops from Afghanistan until the US finished helping the country "get more decent governance". That year, she appeared as herself on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock in the fifth-season episode "Everything Sunny All the Time Always", in which she engages in a classical-music duel with Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin). Within the world of the show, Donaghy had had a relationship with Rice during the show's first season.

In May 2012, Rice served as the keynote speaker at the Southern Methodist University commencement ceremony. Rice delivered a speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention. Daniel W. Drezner of Foreign Affairs praised Rice's address as the best speech of the convention.

In 2013, Rice charged Iran with having "done everything to make certain that you can't trust them", citing Iran's decades-long hiding of its nuclear program and giving the International Atomic Energy Agency "the runaround." In 2015, Rice initially declined taking a public position on Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action "because I know how hard it is to be in there as opposed to out here", but added, "This particular deal I think has some good elements but the price that was paid was pretty high. It’s entirely possible that they are already at threshold status and we will never know it." As the Trump administration weighed pulling out of the agreement, Rice said she would have "stayed in for alliance management reasons more than anything else" and charged the verification methods of the deal as not being "very strong."

In August 2015, High Point University announced that Rice would speak at the 2016 commencement ceremony. Her commencement address was highlighted by The Huffington Post, Fortune, Business Insider, NBC News, Time, and USA Today.

On January 26, 2017, Rice participated in a talk with the University of San Francisco, where she opined the United States had entered "uncharted territory" with President Donald Trump due to his lack of government experience and that the new president should be given time to realize the limitations of his powers. On March 31, Rice met with Vice President Mike Pence and President Trump at the White House. In May, Rice said that alleged Russian hacking of DNC emails should "absolutely not" delegitimize Trump's presidency.

Rice supported the Trump administration "painting a very bleak picture for the Chinese", opining that the cabinet saw the region as the only country with leverage over North Korea. In 2018, Rice called decisions by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to make overtures to the South Koreans "clever" and expressed that he was more isolated and reckless than his father. Ahead of the Singapore Summit, Rice stated her support for negotiations with North Korea, but warned the US should "go step by step, make sure there's good verification of everything the North Koreans are doing, and keep your eye on the prize of denuclearization. Because what we want to do is stop them short of threatening the American homeland."

By September 2019, Rice publicly stated her dislike for Trump's rhetoric, especially on immigration, and warned that Trump needed "to be a lot more careful in the way that he speaks about these things because race is a very delicate and raw nerve in America." In November, as House Democrats moved forward with their impeachment inquiry into President Trump for his correspondence with Ukraine, Rice commented that she did not "like for the President of the United States to mention an American citizen for investigation to a foreign leader" and that she was troubled by "a state of conflict between the foreign policy professionals and someone in Rudy Giuliani who says he was acting on behalf of the President."

In August 2021, Rice wrote an op-ed arguing that the United States withdrew from Afghanistan too quickly and called claims that Afghans were to blame for Taliban takeover a "corrosive and deeply unfair narrative". In October, Rice appeared as a guest cohost on The View, where she asserted that Americans were more interested in household issues than continuing to investigate the January 6 United States Capitol attack. In December, Rice joined Governor of Alabama Kay Ivey in Birmingham to announce the recommendations of the Alabama Innovation Commission, which had worked with the Hoover Institution, on means of advancing statewide technology and entrepreneurship.

In April 2022, Rice attended Madeleine Albright's funeral, where she delivered a reading from the Bible. In July, Rice participated in an Aspen Security Forum with fellow former National Security Advisors Thomas E. Donilon and Stephen Hadley. In October, Rice met with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken at the Hoover Institution Hauck Auditorium and asked the incumbent about issues such as protests in Iran and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In 2023, after former President Trump and Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis criticized US support for Ukraine, Rice stressed the need for any potential presidential candidates to understand the essence of the conflict, which she defined as "defending a rules-based system that says might doesn’t make right, you can’t just extinguish your neighbor."

Author
In February 2009, it was announced that Rice had signed a three-book deal with Crown Publishers worth at least 2.5 million. Crown reported that Rice would "combine candid narrative and acute analysis to tell the story of her time in the White House and as America's top diplomat, and her role in protecting American security and shaping foreign policy during the extraordinary period from 2001-2009." In 2010, Rice released Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family, an account of her upbringing. John McWhorter of The New York Times summarized, "If there is a lesson from Rice’s book, it is that the civil rights revolution made it possible for an extremely talented black person (a woman, no less) to embrace a race-neutral subject and ride it into service as secretary of state, all the while thinking of herself largely as just a person." In 2011, Rice wrote No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington, a memoir of her time in the Bush administration. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Rice explained that she chose the title "because there really is no higher honor than serving your country" and named the Bush administration's attempts to consider "a different kind of Middle East" the hardest challenge they faced. Susan Chira wrote that the book "shows us two Condoleezza Rices: one, the impatient unilateralist who was national security adviser, the other the born-again diplomat who, as secretary of state, worked to repair some of the damage that had been done to American credibility by its unilateralism."

It was announced in 2013 that Rice was writing a book to be published in 2015 by Henry Holt & Company.

In 2017, Rice released Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom, a book in which she makes the case for democracy over totalitarianism or authoritarianism. In an interview, Rice said she began writing the book three years before its release and pondered that her desire to write about democracy stemmed from her youth in Birmingham "when black citizens did not experience full democracy" under segregation.

College Football Playoff Selection Committee
In October 2013, Rice was selected to be one of the thirteen inaugural members of the College Football Playoff selection committee. Her appointment caused a minor controversy in the sport. In October 2014, she revealed that she watched "14 or 15 games every week live on TV on Saturdays and recorded games on Sundays." Her term on the committee expired at the conclusion of the 2016 college football season.

Cleveland Browns Head Coach rumors
On November 18, 2018 ESPN's Adam Schefter reported that a league source had told him that Rice was being considered as a candidate in the Cleveland Browns' head coach search. This report sparked jokes at the expense of the Browns and outcry due to both Rice's lack of any experience in coaching and Rice being a woman. Shortly after the initial report, the Browns and General Manager John Dorsey denied the report saying, "Our coaching search will be thorough and deliberate, but we are still in the process of composing the list of candidates and Secretary Rice has not been discussed." Rice, who is a lifelong Browns fan, also denied the reports but joked that she "would like to call a play or two next season if the Browns need ideas."

Speculation on political future
As early as 2003, there were reports that Rice was considering a run for governor of California, while ruling out running for the Senate in 2004. There was also speculation that Rice would run for the Republican nomination in the 2008 primaries, which she ruled out on Meet the Press. On February 22, 2008, Rice played down any suggestion that she may be on the Republican vice presidential ticket: "I have always said that the one thing that I have not seen myself doing is running for elected office in the United States."

During an interview with the editorial board of The Washington Times on March 27, 2008, Rice said she was "not interested" in running for vice president. In a Gallup poll from March 24 to 27, 2008, Rice was mentioned by eight percent of Republican respondents to be their first choice to be John McCain's Republican vice presidential running mate, slightly behind Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.

Republican strategist Dan Senor said on ABC's This Week on April 6, 2008, that "Condi Rice has been actively, actually in recent weeks, campaigning for" the vice presidential nomination. He based this assessment on her attendance of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform conservative leader's meeting on March 26, 2008. In response to Senor's comments, Rice's spokesperson denied that Rice was seeking the vice presidential nomination, saying, "If she is actively seeking the vice presidency, then she's the last one to know about it."

In August 2008, the speculation about a potential McCain–Rice ticket finally ended when then-Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska was selected as McCain's running-mate.

In early December 2008, Rice praised President-elect Barack Obama's selection of New York senator Hillary Clinton to succeed her as Secretary of State, saying "she's terrific". Rice, who spoke to Clinton after her selection, said Clinton "is someone of intelligence and she'll do a great job".

Rumors arose once again during the 2012 presidential race that presumptive nominee Mitt Romney was looking into vetting Rice for the vice presidency. Rice once again denied any such intentions or desires to become the vice president, reiterating in numerous interviews that she "is a policy maker, not a politician." Speculation ended in August 2012 when Romney announced that Representative Paul Ryan was chosen as his running-mate. Rice campaigned for the Romney-Ryan ticket in the general election.

According to Bob Woodward's 2018 book Fear: Trump in the White House, then-Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus told then Republican nominee Donald Trump, that he should drop out of the race for the good of the party following the release of the Access Hollywood tapes. During these discussions, it was revealed that Mike Pence, the vice presidential nominee, had agreed to replace Trump on the top of the ticket as the Republican presidential nominee, with Rice agreeing to be Pence's running mate.

While promoting his book Out of Many, One: Portraits of America's Immigrants, former President Bush revealed he wrote-in Rice in the 2020 election and said that although Rice was aware of the vote, she told him she "would refuse to accept the office."