Condoleezza Rice wins the hearts of attendees at the TD Ameritrade Elite Advisor Summit

Brooke’s Note: It’s been an eventful first day at TD Ameritrade’s Elite Advisor Summit here in Laguna Beach. The weather is what locals call the June gloom of overcast skies and cool temperatures. The meteorological conditions are of no concern to the East Coasters who are happy to be escaping stifling heat back home. See: TD Ameritrade is pulling out the stops for 100 advisors in Laguna Beach. I heard Tom Bradley and Fred Tomczyk give their 90-minute state-of-the TD speech this afternoon before chatting with Mr. Tomczyk separately afterward. They’re a contrast in styles with Bradley exuding street smarts and charisma and Tomczyk a more buttoned-down competency [and I’ll write about it for Thursday]. I had dinner at a table with some TD staff, an Invesco staffer, an advisor from Kansas and Mark Hurley of the Fiduciary Network. Hurley has been a source of mine for several years but we had never met and had plenty to catch up on. Apparently I missed him jousting with Rudy Adolf, CEO of Focus Financial, at a session earlier in the day. Hurley is not shy about criticizing roll-ups and Adolf is not shy about defending his company. Hurley seems like he’s always charging up San Juan Hill so I wasn’t surprised to hear that he had graduated from West Point and got his start in business at Goldman Sachs. Enthusiasm here at the Montage Resort is predictably high as the sound of surf pounds in the background. One of my dinner mates, Mike Searcy, an RIA from Overland Park, Kan., put it this way: “At most big national conferences, it’s luck of the draw,” he says. “At this conference, everyone is a player.” Still, the biggest player at the conference was the well-spoken woman who addressed the crowd before dinner and so this article focuses on her.

Condoleezza Rice took a crack at solving virtually all of the problems that the United States faces around the world in a one-hour speech here at the TD Ameritrade Elite Advisor Summit oceanside in Orange County and by the end advisors were openly telling her to run for president.

The former Secretary of State was adamant that she wouldn’t be seeking public office, pointing out that she never even ran for student council. “I don’t think it’s for me,” she says.

For the most part — despite goading to do otherwise — she expressed support for the Obama administration though she steered clear of ever using his name.

Questioned about how the U.S. is handling itself in Israel currently, she said: “The administration has been right to be cool about this situation.”

The closest she came to criticizing the current president of the United States was to say: “We need our leaders to address us like we’re grownups.” She said that the Obama administration’s insistence that it can make health care more affordable for our country by adding 30 million people — many of them with pre-existing conditions — to those in coverage didn’t pass the “smell test.”

She started off her speech by running down the list of countries that could usurp the U.S. as the world leader. She disqualified the European Union as disunited and Russia for its bizarre capitalism — where politicians can serve on boards of directors. China comes closest as a rival but it’s really not much of a threat. She questions how a country that is terrified of the Internet can lead an economy based on information.

“The good thing we have going for us is that there is nowhere else to go,” Rice says.

The biggest threats to the United States are from within. She railed against U.S. immigration policy for keeping precious talent out and expressed deep concern about the educational systems in this country.

She believes the war on terror is being won in phases. The original Al-Qaeda organization that toppled the World Trade Center on 9/11 has been “eviscerated” but she adds that “the problem is that they’ve evolved into something else.”

Rice believes that the war on terror must go on and admitted that one mistake the Bush administration made was not putting more resources into training a larger Afghan army, but she believes that the current administration is on the right track with that.

“We have to stick with it,” she says.

Rice allowed that she’s happy not to be having to work directly on these problems anymore and that she’s pleased to be practicing her skills as a concert pianist in her spare time.

Still, Rice is clear that she’s still very politically conservative. “I love my guys at Fox News,” she says. Fox could benefit from inviting more opposing [i.e. liberal] views, Rice added.