Rice, Obama meet at historic crossroads

[JI7]

<WASHINGTON - The Senate Foreign Relations Committee's confirmation hearings for Condoleezza Rice, which began Tuesday, were the stage for a fascinating face-off between the nation's two most prominent African-American political figures: Rice, President Bush's nominee to be Secretary of State, and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, whom some Democrats see as the great hope of their party, perhaps on the national ticket in 2008.

Coming as they did on the day after the Martin Luther King holiday, Rice's testimony and Obama's questions — touching on nuclear proliferation, Pakistan, and the unknown end point for U.S. involvement in Iraq — showed how surely gone are the days when a black politician was judged solely by his or her handling of "black" problems such as racial exclusion or violent crime.

Obama noted the history when he told Rice that without King’s efforts he would not be sitting there in the Hart Senate Office Building asking her questions as a new member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Through the daylong hearing, Rice performed as she is often billed: the technocrat’s technocrat, speaking in a precise, unemotional voice, given to phrases such as “incent that kind of behavior” (referring to persuading Libya to come clean on its Weapons of Mass Destruction program) and “lots of data points” when referring to conflicting intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programs under Saddam Hussein.

In his first round of questioning, which came Tuesday afternoon after the hearing had been under way for several hours, Obama played mostly a supporting role, buttressing queries already made by the committee’s senior Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware. >

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6835185/