Susan Rice’s Personality Disorder [View all]

[DonViejo]

Dec 12, 2012 7:45 AM EST

Brusque. Aggressive. Undiplomatic. The adjectives used to describe the ambassador aren’t kind. Lloyd Grove on Susan Rice’s polarizing temperament—and why that may matter more than Benghazi.

Susan Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations and President Obama’s most visible candidate to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, is being subjected to an immutable law of the Washington power grid: In the rough and tumble of political combat, personality trumps policy. Government policy, especially foreign policy, is rife with nuance and complication. But personality is easier to grasp and harder to shed.

Recent critiques of Rice’s influence on U.S. diplomacy in Rwanda, Sudan, and Eritrea over the past two decades are endlessly debatable among think-tank elites. Republican Sen. John McCain’s threat to block her (hypothetical) confirmation because she relied on faulty intelligence to mischaracterize the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya,—a warning joined by fellow GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte—seems emptier by the day. Rice, after all, is African American and female—two demographics that the Republican Party is not especially anxious to alienate further.

“It is a fact that Susan had no role in determining the security footprint in Benghazi or gathering or assessing the intelligence of what happened before, during or after,” says National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor. “She simply went on TV and gave interviews.”

But Rice’s personality—or “temperament,” in the parlance of her Beltway critics—is increasingly front and center. She is frequently described in the press with such adjectives as “brusque,” “aggressive,” and “undiplomatic in the extreme.”

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/12/susan-rice-s-personality-disorder.html