Neo-con star rising: Condoleezza Rice: as a darling of the neo-conservative syndicate that is running the presidency, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is poised for bigger things.(PROFILE)

"She will be big. Rock star big. A major cultural figure, adorning the bedroom walls of innumerable kids and the covers of innumerable magazines." Thus enthused Jay Nordlinger of the neo-conservative magazine National Review in a 1999 profile of Condoleezza Rice, future national security adviser and secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration.

Foreign policy appointees generally don't cast a very big cultural shadow. Certainly, they don't compete with the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Napoleon Dynamite for wall space in the bedrooms of American adolescents. Why was Rice wreathed in such expectations even prior to the Bush ticket's triumph in 2000? And why is she widely regarded now as a plausible GOP presidential contender in 2008?

At the time that Nordlinger made his mildly delirious prediction of Rice's cultural impact, she was serving as George W. Bush's foreign policy "tutor," a role she had taken at the urging of former Secretary of State George Shultz.

Rice's role as a preelection tutor morphed after the election into an appointment as national security adviser, in which capacity she was "usually the first to see the president in the morning and the last at night," observed Newsweek's Evan Thomas in a 2002 profile of Rice. In an arresting example of the psychological misfire commonly called a "Freudian slip," Rice once publicly referred to Mr. Bush as "my husband."

Thomas points out that within a week of the 9/11 attacks, Rice began "talking to Bush about going after all rogue nations that harbor WMD," rather than focusing specifically on al-Qaeda. And like other prominent administration neo-conservatives, Rice insistently advocated "regime change" in Iraq long before President Bush allegedly made the decision to go to war in 2003, and even prior to the 9/11 attacks. In fact, she called for a campaign against Iraq before George W. Bush was elected. In a January 2000 article for Foreign Affairs magazine, Rice--acting as the official foreign policy expert of the Bush-Cheney campaign--declared: "Nothing will change until Saddam is gone, so the United States must mobilize whatever resources it can, including support from his opposition, to remove him."

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Foreign Affairs is the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group that advocates an all-encompassing internationalist agenda and with which Rice has had a long and active association. She has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1984, serving as an international affairs fellow of the organization while she was special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1986.