Politics & Power Quote by Howard Fineman

Fineman’s move is to trap a president inside his own frame of legitimacy, then twist the key. “By Rice’s own standards” is a scalpel disguised as a concession: he borrows the administration’s preferred logic (Condoleezza Rice’s timeline, thresholds, definitions of what “counts”) and uses it to argue the opposite of what that logic was designed to protect. It’s courtroom language with newsroom snap - meet them where they stand, then show the floorboards are rotten.

The repetition of “war” and the clean, declarative cadence (“well underway,” “the moment he took the oath”) compress history into a moral instant. The intent isn’t to litigate whether the conflict existed; it’s to eliminate the alibi of surprise. If the war preceded the presidency, then inheriting it isn’t an excuse; it’s the job description.

Then comes the pivot: “But did he act like one?” That question isn’t genuine curiosity. It’s an accusation that performance lagged behind circumstance - that the White House wanted the political insulation of wartime necessity without paying the costs of wartime governance: candor, urgency, sacrifice, coherence. “Act” is doing a lot of work here, hinting at staging, optics, and the gap between symbolism and strategy.

Contextually, this is classic post-9/11 accountability journalism: the fight over when the “war” began, what counts as being “at war,” and whether leaders used that language to justify power while dodging responsibility. Fineman turns the administration’s rhetoric into a measuring stick, then asks why the president came up short.