NBC’s Andrea Mitchell commenting on the withdrawal of Susan Rice’s name in consideration for Secretary of State:
“This is not going to help Republicans at all–the fact that a woman, and a woman of color, has been forced out of a confirmation process even before she was nominated…
This was personal. This is where it gets back to the 2008 campaign and things that Susan Rice said as a combatant in that campaign on behalf of Barack Obama–about John McCain and about his trip in 2007 to Iraq, and that did not go over well.
So they viewed her as a political person and not a diplomat despite the fact that she’s the UN Ambassador, was a powerful State Department figure, was in the NSC, had been in the previous Democratic administration, and is a Stanford-educated Rhodes scholar with graduate degrees from Oxford.”