Last week was the best for President Bush since his re-election. That isn’t saying much, of course. His second term has been one long slide into political and military misery. But one person seemed particularly ebullient last week; and there are signs she has some reason to be.

I’m referring to secretary of state Condi Rice, whose long, quiet war of attrition against the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis of incompetence has been showing some rare, stray glimmers of success.

I don’t want to go overboard. Nobody should underestimate Cheney’s ruthlessness or Rumsfeld’s bureaucratic skills. They’re still entrenched and are biding their time. But they have temporarily lost the Iran debate. The switch towards a policy of agreeing to direct negotiations under strict conditions was a victory for Rice and Merkel and Blair.

Bush is shrewd enough to realise that this time, he really does have to exhaust every conceivable diplomatic avenue before he tries the military option (such as it is). Cheney and Rumsfeld have signed onto this, although it was striking that days after the announcement Rumsfeld growled that Iran was “one of the leading terrorist nations of the world”.

He’s right, of course. But that doesn’t mean you don’t try to gain maximum international support for a policy of short-term containment.

Then there was a small retreat on the military detention nightmare. Cheney and Rumsfeld, having constructed the detainee-torture policy, were determined to write it into a new army field manual, in flagrant violation of the McCain amendment and US law. An alliance of decency blocked them: Republican senators John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Warner of Virginia.

According to The New York Times, senior generals also helped stall the plan. And the key figure within the administration who grasps the diplomatic disaster of the Gitmo gulag is Condi Rice. It may not be accidental that in recent months the president’s own position has softened. He has publicly remarked that Abu Ghraib was the biggest mistake of the Iraq invasion; and that he’d like to shut Gitmo down. I may be dreaming, but I hear echoes of Rice in those statements.

The field manual has yet to be published, of course. Rumsfeld is the bureaucratic equivalent of Glenn Close in the bathtub in her final scene in Fatal Attraction. Just when you think he’s done with, he powers back out of the water and goes for your jugular. But for now he and Cheney seem content to swim ominously around, while Rice and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, get work done.

Rice also has a key advantage over Cheney and Rumsfeld. She is virtually inseparable from the president. She almost lives at Camp David when Bush is there, is very close to Laura Bush, and is the president’s constant companion and conversationalist. How many female diplomats are there who love to watch American football with the boys? She is the last person to consult with Bush after many meetings. Apart from Karl Rove, nobody rivals her access.

She is also, one recalls, a student of Brent Scowcroft, the über-realpolitik merchant of the first Bush administration. Her interaction with Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to Iraq, another shrewd operator, has been central to the small, positive changes in Iraq under its new prime minister Nouri Maliki.

She is, in other words, no ideologue. Her only weakness has been her lack of a populist touch, an ability to persuade or calm the American public in the middle of the long hard slog of Iraq. Her predecessor had that; but it made the president suspicious of him, and paradoxically undermined his internal leverage.

Colin Powell’s constant press-leaking also rubbed the president the wrong way.

Condi proved herself first as a Bush family loyalist; now she is beginning to cash in. Under Rice, the State Department has gained real traction against the Pentagon and the vice-president’s office.

And last week we saw something else as well. Rice went to the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America and now a pillar of the Christianist right. She wowed them. Before she even spoke, yells went up that they’d vote for her. And when you read what she said you can see why it was a spectacular performance before a key part of the Republican base. How’s the following for smart pandering:

“[Like] Granddaddy Rice, my father was a minister. And I was born on a Sunday morning and he was literally preaching when I was born. He had been told to go ahead and give his sermon, that child probably wasn’t going to be born before he could get back. But he came out of the pulpit and his mother said, ‘John, you have a little girl.’ That was my first introduction to the church.”

She went on to explain how she grew up in two little rooms in the back of a church in Birmingham, Alabama. The Southern Baptist Convention, formed a century and a half ago to defend slavery as a Christian institution, lapped it up.

But then Rice took another angle: “America will lead the cause of freedom in our world, not because we think ourselves perfect. To the contrary, we cherish democracy and champion its ideals because we know ourselves to be imperfect — with a long history of failures and false starts that testify to our own fallibility. After all, when our Founding Fathers said ‘We the people’, they didn’t mean me. My ancestors in Mr Jefferson’s constitution were three-fifths of a man. And it’s only in my lifetime that America has guaranteed the right to vote for all our citizens. But we have made progress and we are striving toward a more perfect union.”

And so you have a black, unmarried woman telling the largely white family-obsessed southern Baptists about the imperfection of America. She added for good measure: “I’ll tell you a little fact. If I served to the end of my time as secretary of state it will have been 12 years since a white man was secretary of state of the United States of America.”

No, that’s not an applause line at the Democratic convention. It’s the inclusive, humble, pragmatic side of American conservatism. It has been eclipsed these past few years by bigotry and fundamentalism and arrogance. But with Rice you can almost imagine it struggling back to life.

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