BROOKE GLADSTONE:
From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield. Karen Hughes, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, and one of the last of the President's Texas loyalists in the inner circle, has resigned. Here's Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday.
CONDOLEEZZA RICE:
When I asked Karen to come, I asked her to come and to help us make public diplomacy strong and central to the mission of transformational diplomacy, and she has done that. She's done it in spectacular fashion.
BOB GARFIELD:
Heck of a job, Hughsie. She's the third, after Charlotte Beers and Margaret Tutwiler, to fail at improving America's image abroad. According to Pew Research Center numbers cited in the news this week, favorable views of the U.S. are scraping the bottom, as low as 21 percent in Egypt, 15 percent in Pakistan, 13 percent in the Palestinian territories, and a lowly 9 percent in Turkey. But she did spectacularly double the budget.

Price Floyd was the Director of Media Affairs under Hughes. He knows the job and the mission. We asked him to grade her job performance.
PRICE FLOYD:
I'll give her a B on energy and getting funding, but she'll have to get an F on actually changing the perception of the U.S. overseas.
BOB GARFIELD:
That's depressing.
PRICE FLOYD:
You know, one of the things that she had coming in that everyone said was this clout, that she had the President's ear. And now some people are saying, look she had an impossible job, no one could have done it. But, she can't have it both ways. She can't have come in under the guise of, look I'm the person who has the President's ear — I can call him up and I can make things happen.

And, in fact, everyone tells one story of when she was meeting with the Palestinians in Gaza, and she called the President up right there and said, you've got to meet with these people when they come to Washington, and he agreed.

So if she has that kind of clout, why didn't that turn in to any actual changes? You know, she could have easily told the President, we need to close Guantanamo. I don't know if she did or not, but it's certainly not closed.
BOB GARFIELD:
Hughes established something called the Rapid Reaction Unit. What's that all about?
PRICE FLOYD:
That was part of her effort to try to hit back in the same news cycle in foreign markets on news stories that the State Department deemed as incorrect or false. The idea was to put people on right after a report came out on Al-Jazeera, put someone who spoke Arabic, to push back on bad news stories or incorrect news stories.
BOB GARFIELD:
Apart from putting out little brush fires before they had a chance to become, you know, wildfires, any reason to think that the Rapid Reaction Unit was successful?
PRICE FLOYD:
I'm not sure. When it first started up, one of the things they asked for was a report on how many interviews people had done as part of this Rapid Reaction Unit. And the first report that came back was 13 pages of interviews done by our ambassadors and other people at embassies in Europe and in Arab countries - you know, 70, 80 interviews.

But if there was any impact, it hasn't been seen in any poll numbers. Both the Pew and the BBC polls that are done show a continued downward trend in the perception overseas. So I think at the most it did was put out a few brush fires.
BOB GARFIELD:
Whenever the subject of America's public diplomacy comes up, someone invokes the truism nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. And you have said, on this show and elsewhere that the problem isn't so much how we go about trying to influence others but the underlying policies themselves.

And you have a pretty long checklist of what it is about America's behavior in the world that inflames public opinion far beyond Karen Hughes’ ability to influence it. What's on your checklist?
PRICE FLOYD:
The biggest one is Guantanamo. The pictures that appear on Al Jazeera and all the other Pan-Arab stations does us no end of ill will. That's one.

Another issue that we could take quick action on is climate change. If we were seen to actually participate in discussions on limiting greenhouses gasses, I think that would go a long ways to diffusing some of the negative perceptions of the U.S. overseas.

There's a whole list of other things, even HIV-AIDS. The substance is we've done more than anyone else, this administration has, to stop the spread of HIV-AIDS, and yet, because we're doing it alone —- we're not doing it with the U.N. and others -- we get bad grades on it.
BOB GARFIELD:
Will the President be able to fill this job? [LAUGHS] Who wants this gig?
[LAUGHTER]
PRICE FLOYD:
Well, I'm not sure who wants it. I hope the President chooses someone much in the vein of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who had been a critic of the administration's Iraq policies. Therefore, when he came in as Secretary of Defense, he had a credibility on this issue, and therefore others, that someone who was simply a loyal Bush follower did not.

What we need is someone who's willing to push the bureaucracy, come up with new ideas and stand up and call out policies that are being harmful to our public diplomacy efforts.
BOB GARFIELD:
Price, thank you very much.
PRICE FLOYD:
Thank you so much for having me on.
BOB GARFIELD:
Price Floyd, former director of media affairs under Karen Hughes, is now Director of External Relations for the Center for New American Security.