News from Around the World

I want to say something favorable about Bush again. It is this: He seems to me to have completely transcended the biases of gender and race in his appointments. Oh, he has his prejudices: He wants his appointees to be a certain sort of conservative. But no one can deny that he has broken the glass ceiling for women and blacks and Latinos in the executive and judicial branches. This is an embarrassment for Democrats who, like their present chairman, still attribute bigotry wholesale to Republicans. Well, Bush is a Republican who isn't bigoted: He has put his foreign policy in the hands and head of a female African American. This is not without some risk. Imagine the inner challenge to Saudis and other Arabs who encounter Condoleezza Rice as the plenipotentiary of the most powerful country on earth. You get an inkling of what that might feel like from the Arab saying that "a black face begins a black day." And just look at the proliferation of minorities among generals. These aren't presidential appointees, of course. Many of these decencies are the work of the hated Donald Rumsfeld. Bill Clinton was the first black president, or so Toni Morrison ruled. He even put his post-presidential office in Harlem. But he did not appoint one African American to a truly significant office in the executive branch. Of course, Jesse Jackson did a lot of hustling around the Clinton administration, having been named "Special Envoy of the President and Secretary of State for the Promotion of Democracy in Africa." Clinton did appoint a woman to the big post of secretary of state, and Madeleine Albright did literally chase breathlessly after Yasir Arafat at Camp David, begging him to return to the conference table. Well, dignity she did not have. Let's call her excitability diligence.