HUFFINGTON POST
By Christina Wilkie
July 10, 2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-wilkie/condoleezza-rice-speech-immigration-reform-vice-president_b_1661508.html
As presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney continues to mull over whom to choose as his running mate, one name has started to be brought up more often -- former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Fueled by comments from Ann Romney last week that her husband is considering choosing a woman as his VP nominee, many have speculated that the Stanford University professor may make her way back onto the political stage.
Rice has denied on several occasions that she is interested in the job, most recently to CBS's Charlie Rose. Her standard line is that she loves policy, but has no interest in politics. But that hasn't stopped Beltway pundits from speculating as to what Rice could bring to a joint ticket. On the one hand, Rice's experience would help balance Romney's lack of foreign policy bona fides. On the other hand, she worked for George W. Bush, the least popular U.S. president still alive -- which could make her a liability.
Despite her insistence that she has no interest in being Romney's #2, Rice has, intentionally or unintentionally, made herself seem more available after recent appearances she has made at Republican political functions.
In late June, Rice gave a speech to an elite group of Republican donors at a resort in Utah. Her remarks weren't released to the media, but attendees described the former diplomat's "impassioned plea" for renewed U.S. leadership at home and abroad as "spectacular," and the crowd reportedly gave her two standing ovations.
We don't know exactly what she said, but it was most likely very similar to the speech she delivered two days later to a group of human resources executives in Atlanta. Roughly the same length as her remarks in Utah, the 15-minute speech tackled the same themes she was reported to have spoken to the Romney donors about. She was equally as well received in Atlanta as she was in Utah.
While Rice's office has yet to confirm that they were the same speech, the similarity makes sense -- public figures on the lecture circuit typically have one stump speech, which they tweak for different audiences.
In Utah she opened with a joke about the vice presidential speculation, which likely played well because the crowd included VP short-listers like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and New Hampshire Sen. Rob Portman. Over the course of her talk, she framed the past decade in terms of three "great shocks": 9/11, the worldwide financial crisis and the Arab Spring.
The crises, she said, demanded a response rarely discussed during an election centered on domestic policy debates: American global leadership.
"If this international system that is reeling from these three great shocks is going to find power again, it's going to do so because somebody steps up to take leadership," Rice said.
"It's going to do so because there's always a country that leads. There's always a country that has a view of how human history ought to unfold. And the United States of America has had a view. It is that free markets and free peoples ought to lead the future."
From there, Rice pivoted to a controversial issue, especially among Republicans -- comprehensive immigration reform.
"It doesn't matter where you came from, it matters where you're going," Rice said. "That belief has led people to come here for generations from across the world, just to be a part of that. Frankly, it hasn't mattered whether it was Sergei Brin, whose parents brought him here at 7 years old from Russia and he founds Google, or the guy who came to make five dollars and fifty cents. They are the same ambitious, risk-taking people and America has been able to gather them."
For Romney, however, Rice's public support of immigration reform may alone be enough to disqualify her from VP consideration.
Despite recent claims that he plans to implement an immigration reform plan if elected, Romney has yet to offer any details about what such a plan might look like.
He has said that he opposes immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for any of the 12 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States -- what he calls "amnesty" plans. Instead, he has proposed that illegal immigrants be convinced to "self-deport," and return to their home countries in order to re-apply for immigration to the U.S.
But immigration wasn't the only element of Rice's speech that was out of sync with Romney's platform.
The former secretary of state also singled out "huge inequities between the rich and the poor" as the main reasons that "places like Brazil and India, great multi-ethnic democracies that are countries that have a lot of potential ... are having trouble reaching that potential."
"Brazil is indeed Sao Paulo and Rio," she said, "but Brazil is also the [shanty-town] hills above Rio. And India is of course Mumbai and Bangalore, but India is also Calcutta."
Rice paid no heed to the fact that economic inequality is an issue, politically speaking, that belongs to Democrats, and President Barack Obama has made no secret of his plans to capitalize on voter frustration over the wealth gap.
Despite a heavy focus on issues abroad, Rice made several significant points regarding economic inequality in the U.S.
"Americans are not united by blood or ethnicity or religion or nationality," she said. "We are united by a creed. You can come from humble circumstances and you can do great things. And if that's ever not true, then this society will rip itself apart."
"This has been the country that has been the most capable of mobilizing human potential, because it hasn't mattered where you came from, it's only mattered where you're going," she said.
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