At the end of Rice's confirmation hearings last month, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said he would vote in favor, despite misgivings, because at least she has the ear of the president and might counter the advice of the neocons. "Then again," Biden added (and I'm quoting from memory), "maybe she is a neocon. I don't know." That sums it up. We don't know. The national security adviser is a position not subjected to the Senate's consent, so no outsider knows just what kind of advice Rice gave the president during the first term; we don't know which side she took in the battles between Colin Powell on the one hand and the Rumsfeld-Cheney alliance on the other. As noted, the appointments she's made in her brief time as secretary of state—especially her success at rejecting John Bolton as her deputy, a move that the neocons strongly pushed—show a more pragmatic bent or, at least, a desire to stake out her own positions. But on specific issues, we don't know where she stands. As far back as early January 2001, during the transition, Powell very much favored continuing the nuclear negotiations with North Korea that Clinton had begun. To participants at the time, Rice seemed cool to the notion, at best. (One of Bush's first public pronouncements, once in office, was to reject the idea brusquely—as a result of which Kim Jong-il moved ahead with his program, started building a few A-bombs, and, now it seems almost certain, supplied enriched uranium to Libya and possibly others.) Another sign of Rice's possible sentiments: Cheney and Rumsfeld beat out Powell on nearly every high-profile issue of national security policy. Could Rice have kept Bush's confidence if she'd taken the loser's side in every battle? Would she have been promoted to secretary of state if she'd done so?