Weeks after the sturm und drang over the nomination of “video protest” fabulist Susan Rice for Secretary of State, we learn, courtesy of the Weekly Standard, that John Kerry was offered the job long before Rice threw in the towel:
John Kerry says that President Obama offered him the secretary of state job a week before Susan Rice publicly pulled out of the running for the job.
“He called me, actually a week before Susan got out of the thing,” Kerry tells the Boston Globe. “He called me and said, ‘You’re my choice. I want you to do this.’ He asked me to keep it quiet. I did. I sat on it.”
At the time, Rice pulling out of the running for the top State Department job suggested that the position had simply fallen to Kerry, who had been in a neck-and-neck competition for the job. Now it seems that the White House allowed Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, to publicly save face by publicly withdrawing from a job that was never going to be offered to her in the first place.
For some reason, White House spokesman Jay Carney didn’t feel like discussing Kerry’s remarks at today’s press briefing.
This is particularly irksome because the Rice nomination was defended, to the very end, in utterly savage terms. Anyone who challenged Rice’s qualifications was denounced as the lowest form of sub-human in today’s political culture: a racist, sexist, or probably both.
But now we learn that even as Rice defenders were still accusing her critics of hate crimes, Obama was already quietly offering the job to John Kerry? That means our supposedly all-inclusive uniter of a President was deliberately allowing a bitter racialist feud to boil along pointlessly for at least a week longer than necessary. That’s a long time in Washington politics.
Follow-up question, should the President’s flacks ever feel like discussing it: when was Susan Rice told that John Kerry was going to be Secretary of State?
