Condi vs Hillary

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this excerpt from Dick Morris' upcoming book "Condi vs Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race"

I was especially moved by Condi's life story:

Condoleezza Rice's public record at the White House is of relatively recent vintage. It is her life story, more than her public career, that tells us why she could be a great President. Rice's biography is a unique story that bears elaboration. Condoleezza Rice has been defying odds since she was born in an all-black community in Birmingham, Alabama. Her family was solidly middle class, but in the Birmingham of those days, racial barriers could not be bypassed, even by money.

Shopping as a young girl with her mother at a local department store, an employee told her she could not use the 'whites only' dressing room and had to try on her clothing in a back storage cupboard. When Condi's mother refused and threatened to leave, the embarrassed employee relented. 'I remember,' Condi relates, 'the woman standing there guarding the [dressing room] door worried to death that she was going to lose her job.'

But the event that seared its way most powerfully into Rice's memory was the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a few miles from her house. She heard the blast. Rice recalls the terror she felt, as an eight-year-old, that day.

'These terrible events burned into my consciousness,' she remembers. And as America shook its head in disbelief at the murder of four girls in the blast, Condi Rice was mourning the two she knew, including Denise McNair, her kindergarten classmate.

'I remember more than anything the small coffins and the sense that Birmingham was not a very safe place.'

Racism also followed her to the University of Denver, where her professor lectured the 250 students in his class on the genetic inferiority of African-Americans, citing the pseudo-scientific work of William Shockley.

Rice simmered as her professor recounted Shockley's belief that 'art, literature, technology, linguistics - all the treasures of Western civilisation - are the products of the superior white intellect'.

'Rather than crouch down in her seat to avoid the onslaught,' her biographer Antonia Felix reports, Rice 'sprang out of her chair and defended herself: "I'm the one who speaks French! I'm the one who plays Beethoven. I'm better at your culture than you are. This can be taught!'"

You tell 'em, CONDI!

As you all know, I'm a HUGE Condi fan. I even have a website dedicated to push and help Condoleeza Rice run for president in 2008. It's currently dormant now, but it will be active again around early 2007.