Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

(COMTEX) B: Rice Redefines Role As Secretary of State ( AP Online )

WASHINGTON, Apr 25, 2005 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- Condoleezza Rice skips
across time zones and consumes miles with the same gusto she applies on the
treadmill before the sun comes up.

Three months into her job as secretary of state, Rice has pretty much defined
herself as a tireless, stylish blur. She's been out of town the equivalent of
one month, her more than 73,000 miles in the air amounting to almost three
circles of the globe.

She walks fast, talks fast and packs her schedule, from her ritual exercise at
5:30 a.m. to phone calls late at night. She glides on the thin ice of diplomacy
in a whirl between continents, a former competitive skater who gave up the sport
because it was too solitary.

"The secretary's philosophy is there should be no wasted motion," said senior
adviser Jim Wilkinson, one of the aides who moved with Rice to the State
Department when she left the White House as President Bush's national security
adviser.

Her latest trip, which begins Monday, is another geography-defying workout, a
north-south-north-south zigzag to four South and Central American countries over
four days.

Following the immensely popular Colin Powell into the job, Rice quickly has
emerged as one of the most recognizable of Bush's senior circle and the only one
mentioned as a possible candidate for president. Rice has said she does not want
that job - NFL commissioner would be more to her taste - but not everyone buys
that.

A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll put Rice's job approval at 61 percent, higher than
her boss's 50 percent rating. Still, she is well below the rating for Powell,
who was approved by about three-quarters of Americans late last year.

Whatever people think of Rice's diplomacy, they treat her as something of a rock
star. Everywhere she goes abroad, Rice occupies front-page real estate in the
local papers. At home, it is possible her clothes and hair are under closer
scrutiny than her job performance.

"I mean, that's the true issue that America has to face," Queen Latifah cracked
on public radio. "It ain't Iran. It ain't Iraq. It's Condoleezza and can she get
in my salon and can we really lay a hot comb to that head?"

The first black woman to be America's chief diplomat, the 50-year-old Rice seems
comfortable as the object of curiosity.

She was brave enough to stride through a U.S. Army base in Germany wearing a
long, high-necked coat and black stiletto boots. She laughed off stares and
admiring comments when she wore a daring red ball gown to a staid Washington
dinner.

"I very often am asked questions about, 'Do you act differently because you are
a female or do you act differently because you are black?"' Rice told Korean
bloggers recently. "I always say to people, 'I'm a package. I'm black and I'm
female and me."'

Even before this week's trip, she had visited 21 countries on three continents.
All of the travel aside, whether she will end up as a consequential secretary of
state remains to be seen.

Rice is an academic by training and it shows.

She likes the give and take of a setting like the political science academy
Sciences Po in Paris, where she gave a speech in February. Centerpiece of a
fence-mending trip to Europe, the speech was mostly notable for its location - a
hotbed of French academic liberalism.

While breaking no new ground, Rice was charming and sharp in answering
questions, impressing scholars not easily swayed by U.S. arguments.

Rice manages to look perfectly put together almost always. Bobby pins keep that
modified 1960s flip hairdo in place.

A minor exception: her occasional appearance on her plane wearing a velour track
suit. But even that is a step above the polyester track suit Powell used to
wear, which appeared to be chain-store quality and Reagan-administration
vintage.

Rice even managed to look dignified, if startled, when a former Japanese sumo
star enveloped her in a bear hug on the tarmac in Tokyo.

She is deeply religious and says so. She said she has never missed a Palm Sunday
service and insisted on attending services in China last month - at a
state-approved church. She could have worshipped in South Korea instead and
still kept her perfect attendance record; doing so in China was a subtle poke at
the atheistic communist leaders.

On just one of her jam-packed days, in February, Rice started before dawn in
Jerusalem after a late-night dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
She went by heavily armed motorcade to the West Bank, on to Ramallah to meet
newly elected Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, then back to Jerusalem and on
to Rome, where she toured the Pantheon before the day was out.

Some in the crowd of paparazzi shouted "con dolcezza," the Italian musical term
from which her unusual first name is derived. It means to play "with sweetness."

---

On the Net:

A map of Rice's travels is available at:
http://wid.ap.org/series/insidewash/ricetravels.html

State Department background on Rice: http://www.state.gov/secretary/

By ANNE GEARAN
AP Diplomatic Writer

Copyright 2005 Associated Press, All rights reserved

-0-

*** end of story ***

[F6 comment -- geez louise, what a completely ridiculous and outrageously full of it puff piece on dubya's always perfectly loyal and amoral little liar/workout partner/dominatrix (see emphasis above)/house-slave -- from AP, no less -- I'm not sure even Moon's UPI at its worst could (or would) stoop to match this truly embarrassing piece of utterly shameless and nonsensical propaganda . . .]