Rice tells San Francisco audience to be patient with new Iraq government.

Byline: Mary Ann Ostrom

SAN FRANCISCO _ Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that Americans should show more patience before they criticize the fledgling Iraqi government and, alluding to slavery, reminded her San Francisco audience that the United States' own early experience with democracy had much more serious flaws.

"We are a very impatient culture," she told an audience of 1,300 at Davies Symphony Hall. "When you want to criticize what they're doing and it's taking a long time and this and that, just remember, not to this date, have they made a compromise as bad as the one in 1789 that made my ancestors three-fifths of a man. So let's be humble about what they're going through."

Rice was referring to the constitutional compromise that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person to determine the size of a state's congressional delegation. Rice, who followed Colin Powell as the second African-American secretary of state, …