Rice as VP?
Posted: Thursday, March 27, 2008 5:53 PM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Republicans, 2008
From NBC's Libby Leist
Soon after word leaked that Secretary Rice spoke in a closed session to Grover Norquist's Amercians for Tax Reform yesterday morning in Washington, the blogosphere began to speculate that Rice must be floating the idea of running on a ticket with John McCain
But, Rice's spokesman laughed it off today insisting that her talk to Norquist's group was all about U.S. foreign policy and Rice herself dismissed the idea last month when asked at a press conference if she would consider running as Vice President (see below)
All signs out of the State Department are that Rice's immediate plan is to head back to California, teach at Stanford and write a book.
Feb. 22, 2008:
Q There have been several articles written about "Condoleezza Rice for vice president." And some have called this a Republican dream team with you on the ticket. If asked, would you be willing to consider accepting that?
RICE: I've said all along what I'm going to do. You can all come and visit me in California. (Chuckles.)
Q So -- so no? Not this time?
RICE: I have always said that the one thing that I have not seen myself doing is running for elected office in the United States. I have -- for elected office, because I didn't even run for high school president. You know, it's sort of not in my genes.
But look, there will be very good people running for the American people to make their choices. I will be making my choice as a voter, and that's going to be fun after a campaign in 2000 in which I was extremely involved, after the reelected in 2004, where I was national security adviser and so not involved as directly, but obviously with an interest in how it came out. And I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing as secretary of State to see if we can use the last few months, as the president has put it, to sprint to the finish, because there's a lot of work to do.
This has been a really monumental period in American foreign policy. As a student of foreign policy, I don't know that I've seen many that have been more consequential. And I'm looking forward to ending this period with the United States having faced a lot of the challenges that came out of not just September 11th but the rapid changes going on around the world. And I'll be paying attention to that.
