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  Susan Rice Hearts Her Family

  Posted Saturday, January 17, 2009 10:13 AM | By Dayo Olopade
  Good morning, ladies—I'm inaugurating my inaugural week of XX conversation by chasing tourists off my stoop with a shotgun. Actually, I'm conserving my energies for the whirlwind that's about to hit Washington (with enough repetition, inaugural starts to sound dirty) and working on a piece about Barack Obama's soon-to-be-confirmed ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice. I showed up for both Rice's nomination announcement in Chicago in December and her confirmation hearing last week. At both events, she was on message about diplomacy and Iran and blah blah blah. More importantly, her adorable nuclear family—two children, a hubby, and both parents—was also present, fairly leaning out of their seats with anticipation. And on both occasions she interrupted the pressing business of telegraphing U.S. foreign policy to acknowledge her kids and husband. At the Chicago presser (during which Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, Jim Jones, Janet Napolitano, and Robert Gates were also named to their posts), she was the only one to do so.
  
  So what gives? Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday, John Kerry (he of the Chelsea Clinton “intern” comment) invited Rice to introduce her family—and she ran with it, gushing through her (invisible) nerves. Further, she opened her prepared statement with a reference to her daughter: “Like so many Americans, I first heard of the United Nations as a child about the age of my daughter, Maris,” she said. (I later saw Maris plopped on the rug outside the hearing room with a nanny and pops Ian Cameron.) Perhaps it was pre-emptive guilt about the grueling job Mommy signed up for; perhaps Rice, known as a brash negotiator, had simply wandered off the tough-girl reservation—Napolitano (single), and Clinton (one child) did not make similar statements at similar junctures. And Rice is younger, with younger kids, than the rest of Obama’s cabinet. But as she prepares to enter the sensitive ecosystem that is the U.N., I wonder what, if anything, such enthusiastic maternity portends. And, aside from Eric "please pick me, I'm human" Holder and Joe "Girl-girls are tougher than girl-boys” Biden—have any of the top male appointees volunteered similar introductions?
  

About Dayo Olopade

• Dayo Olopade is the Washington Reporter for the Root.

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