Every President Has His Rice

Barack Obama today named Susan Rice as his Ambassador to the United Nations. If confirmed, she will become the second black woman with the Rice surname to provide foreign policy counsel to a U.S. president. But she will be very different from Condoleezza Rice, the current Secretary of State.

The 44-year-old Susan Elizabeth Rice has a long history in Democratic Party foreign policy circles. She served the last Democrat in the White House, President Bill Clinton, and has served as an adviser to the last two Democratic presidential nominees, John Kerry and Barack Obama.

Rice began her diplomatic career specializing in international organizations and peacekeeping at the National Security Council (NSC) in the Clinton White House. Later she was promoted to senior director for African affairs at the NSC and then moved to the State Department to become assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the second term of the Clinton administration.

Like her namesake, Condoleezza Rice, she comes with an impressive educational background. A Rhodes Scholar with a B.A. in history from Stanford University and a doctorate from Oxford University in England, Susan Rice has the pedigree of an Ivy League professor. But she has spent much of her career directly engaged in policy.

Condoleezza and Susan Rice are not related, but the two women -- born almost exactly 10 years apart (November 1954 and November 1964) -- both have ties to Stanford University. Condoleezza Rice taught political science at Stanford in the 1980s while Susan Rice was a student there.

Although Condoleezza Rice grew up in segregated Alabama as the daughter of a preacher-educator as a father and a high school guidance counselor as a mother, Susan Rice grew up in Washington, D.C. as the daughter of an Ivy League economics professor for a dad and education policy scholar as a mom.

Even in high school, Susan Rice excelled in multi-tasking, becoming a three-sport athlete, student council president, and valedictorian at National Cathedral School in Washington. For her part, Condoleezza Rice excelled in music, foreign language and in the classroom during high school.

But their lives took different paths as they matured in their careers. Condoleezza Rice devoted her life to academia at Stanford and became a scholar, while Susan Rice left academia after Oxford and immersed herself in policy. Both women have doctorate degrees. Unlike Condoleezza Rice, however, Susan Rice is married and has two children.

Currently on leave from her position as a senior foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, Rice has spent much of the past year working to elect Obama, helping to develop his foreign policy and speaking to the media on behalf of her candidate.

Susan Rice has been a critic of U.S. policy toward Sudan, which she said last year "has coupled generous humanitarian assistance with unfulfilled threats and feckless diplomacy."

In a paper written last year, she proposed a five-step plan, arguing the U.S. should (1) impose tougher sanctions on Khartoum, (2) support efforts to unify the rebel groups and negotiate a durable ceasefire and political agreement to end the conflict, (3) speed deployment of the UN-AU force by training, equipping, airlifting, and otherwise supporting the rapid deployment of UN battalions, (4) implement and robustly enforce, with NATO, a no-fly zone, and (5) authorize the use of force in order to end the genocide.

If confirmed as Ambassador to the United Nations, she will finally have the platform, the opportunity and perhaps the duty to do something about the problem.