Here’s what David Frum has to say about Condoleezza Rice’s upcoming promotion :

By shifting Condoleezza Rice to State, the president is gaining a loyalist and an appealing public face for US advocacy in the world. He is also shifting Rice to a job more suited to her talents. The NSC adviser is a policy coordinator and enforcer ? a job at which Rice has obviously not succeeded.

Now I have no doubt that Rice would be more loyal to the President, or that loyalty would be the most important job qualification when it comes to serving in this administration, but is the Secretary of State really a job that is “more suited to her talents”?

To give Ms. Rice some credit, she’s got an impressive resume. She’s written a few books on foreign policy, where her expertise is in Soviet and Eastern European affairs. She’s been affiliated with a few prominent think-tanks such as the Center for International Security and Arms Control, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Hoover Institution. She’s held advisory roles in various positions of the last four Presidents and she’s been teaching at Stanford since 1981. So, when it comes to foreign policy, Condi knows her shit.

So, wouldn’t that make her perfectly suited to be the President’s top advisor on national security issues? Well, to quote a Slate article about her 9/11 Commission testimony, she’s got some management problems :

The problem, she argued, was cultural (a senate aversion to domestic intelligence gathering) and structural (the bureaucratic schisms between the FBI and the CIA, among others). But this is the analysis of a political scientist, not a policymaker. Culture and bureaucracies form the backdrop against which officials perceive threats, devise options, and make choices. It is good that Rice, a political scientist by training, recognized that this backdrop can place blinders and constraints on decision-makers. But her job as a high-ranking decision-maker is to strip away the blinders and maneuver around the constraints. This is especially so given that she is the one decision-maker who is supposed to coordinate the views of the various agencies and present them as a coherent picture to the president of the United States. Her testimony today provides disturbing evidence that she failed at this task?failed even to understand that it was part of her job description.

So here’s the question I’d like to see pop up during the confirmation hearings : If the reason that Condi is a bad national security advisor is that she’s unable to get people to put aside their differences and talk to each other, why the hell would she be a good pick for our nation’s top diplomat?? Especially when her resume shows that she doesn’t seem to have any diplomatic background at all.