Condi Rice fumbles but recovers

Posted by Cam Simpson at 6:30 pm CST

Publicly confessing mistakes seems distinctly un-Bush. So Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice raised eyebrows this week when she acknowledged a couple of recent misses. Not only did Rice seemingly break rank by allowing that mistakes had been made, but she did it twice in three days.

Rice surprised some of the diplomatic scribes padding away at their laptop keyboards in the back of her plane Sunday morning when she gave an in-depth and direct answer to the very first question posed to her. The plane was on its way to London for urgent meetings to produce a common voice from the world's major powers on two crises - a future Palestinian government led by Hamas, the designated terrorist group that won last week's election in a landslide, and Iran's nuclear program.

"Madame Secretary," your loyal scribe inquired, "can you tell us why you think people in your office were so caught off guard by Hamas' strong showing, and did you express any displeasure that that was the case?"

Perhaps Rice knew word had already spread beyond her inner circle that she had reportedly chewed out some members of that same inner circle for the way in which the Bush administration's foreign policy team badly misjudged the possibility of a Hamas landslide.

Or maybe America's top diplomat was simply tired of sticking to that famously disciplined drumbeat known as the Bush message.

Or maybe she just wanted to get it off her chest.

No matter, the answer was a bit of a stunner, at least to some of the reporters.
After explaining that everyone, including perhaps the militant Islamic movement itself, was caught off guard, Rice made it clear she was not happy with her own agency's performance.

"Certainly I've asked why nobody saw it coming, and I hope that we will take a hard look, because it does say something about perhaps not having had a good enough pulse on the Palestinian population, as opposed to elites in Ramallah and the like," Rice said, letting go with an uncharacteristic dig at both her own staff and the Palestinian "elites" she's been dealing with for five years.

"Now, to be sure, it's hard -- with the security situation it's hard to get people around -- but I've been long concerned … that we probably needed to get more people into places like Jerusalem, into places like Ramallah, so that we could have a better pulse," she continued. "But sure, I'm concerned about it. And we'll try to get an analysis of what we might have known better. But I want to emphasize, I don't think we were alone in being surprised."

Her surprising answer, at least in part, inspired a front-page story in The New York Times.

DIPLOMATIC FUMBLE

Rice admitted a second miscalculation, albeit one that is frivolous compared to misjudging Hamas. This misstep, admitted on the way back from London Tuesday, could cause a row just beyond the Steel Curtain, in the land of Three Rivers.

The famous gridiron fan said she correctly picked the Pittsburgh Steelers to beat the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC wild card game on the opening weekend of the NFL playoffs. But, she candidly confessed, "I have picked against them (Pittsburgh) every game since." That would be the Pittsburgh team that is now in the Super Bowl.

So that’s one win and two losses for Rice, including her decision to back your loyal scribe's own Indianapolis Colts (begin brief interlude of mournful music).

But Rice took another bold step Tuesday, admitting that she's learned from her mistakes.

"I'm not picking against them again," she said of the Steelers well-earned appearance in Sunday's Super Bowl. "So I think I believe the Steelers are going to win it."

"I think I believe" isn't exactly a firm prediction, but it usually doesn't get any stronger than that in diplomatese, which is the art of saying something without saying anything, while simultaneously hedging against potential losses.

Rice plans to watch the big game from inside the stadium. It should be better than the view she had last year, which came via satellite during the wee hours in a Jerusalem hotel.