Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice is reportedly on the short list for vice president to run alongside Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket.
Like all vice presidential picks, the hope is that she’ll bring more voters into the fold.
But there’s one voter she’s not likely to win over – and it’s a close member of her own family.
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“I have a 23-year-old son whom I love dearly, whose politics are very, very different from my own and from the rest of our family,” Rice told NPR this week. “My son and I will have some robust disagreements over some matters of policy, not all. And yet, at the end of the day, you know, I love him dearly, and he loves me.”
That son is John David Rice-Cameron, who made headlines in 2018 when he not only came out as a big supporter of President Donald Trump, but president of the College Republicans on the Stanford campus and the activism director for the California College Republicans.
He told Fox News that he and his famous mother have a “great relationship.”
But when it comes to politics, this apple fell far, far from the tree.
“We disagree on most of the standard Republican/Democrat disagreements,” he told Fox News at the time.
He said he was inspired to become a conservative by the Tea Party movement – which, ironically, sprung up in response to her mother’s old boss, then-President Barack Obama.
Rice-Cameron said he was also influenced by conservative media, including talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin.
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“Sometimes my dad would listen to Rush Limbaugh and he would kind of argue with him,” Rice-Cameron told the College Fix in 2018. “I just found myself agreeing with basically everything Rush Limbaugh was saying.”
He turned those beliefs into activism, even when it led to controversy such as when he invited Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens to campus for a “Make Stanford Great Again” event when he was a student there.
He praised the two for their “combative conservatism” approach.
“You don’t provoke for the sake of provoking because that is not principled,” he told the College Fix. “But you don’t let the fact that someone might get triggered prevent you from saying or doing something important. We must break this leftist monopoly.”
His mother told NPR that the two agree on issues such as the threats posed by China and Russia.
“We disagree on things like choice,” she said. “I’m pro-choice. He’s pro-life. That’s the kind of difference that we ought to be able to respect.”
Families are complicated, especially when it comes to sports and politics.
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How many Thanksgiving meals have erupted over those topics?
More significantly, however, Rice has plenty of other baggage that she brings to any potential candidacy – and they go far beyond family squabbles.
Rice served first as ambassador to the United Nations and later as national security advisor to then-President Barack Obama.
But if she’s remembered for anything in those roles, it’s the shifting story on the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which led to the deaths of ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Rice infamously claimed it was the result of a demonstration over an anti-Muslim video.
In reality, it wasn’t a protest, but a planned attack that caught the U.S. woefully unprepared – and with tragic consequences.
In her memoir, Rice claimed to be a victim herself because of the criticism she faced after the attack.
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“Why me?” she wrote last year in the book Tough Love. “Why was I the one the GOP went after when I was a comparatively bit player in the actual Benghazi drama?”
Whether she likes it or not, those issues will no doubt come up again – and that’s true whether Rice is selected as vice president or serves in some other role in the Biden campaign.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”