Bumper Stickers

The bumper-stickers around town are entertaining to read, since there is little else to do when stuck in the gridlock. The Kerry people have defiantly kept theirs, and some ask about a village that is missing its idiot. There are admonitions for both World Peace and Whirled Peas, smug ones from the Victors, and bitter ones from the Vanquished.

The most popular one is non-political, being the simply the letters “VOB” in a white circle, signifying that the driver of the car would rather be on Virginia ‘s Outer Banks than languishing her in the sodden capital. But I take caution in the ones- and there are a lot of them- not to Mess with Texas .

So I won’t. But I am avoiding work this morning, and having a hard time not thinking about the Lone Star State , or at least some of the more interesting characters that have come here from there. The work I am avoiding this Sunday is strewn in bits across the flat surfaces of the condo, on the floor and the Murphy bed. It is a Professional Journal I have agreed to edit, and I am overcome with a sense of déjà vu. It is supposed to go to press tomorrow morning, and presumably I am going along with it.

Consequently, I have a full day ahead, messing around with files.

I know how that goes. We were doing the planning for the nuclear targets in the deck before a deployment to the Mediterranean one year, long ago, in the dawn of the information processing age. The target planning was complex, and highly formatted as you might expect.

Still, all the plans had a little wildness in them, and the associated factors for each assumption, target bearing, delivery profile and weapon characteristics had to be factored for each one. So I went to the ship a day or two before the pilots were supposed to report to do the planning.

They never told us what the targets actually were until we pulled away from the shore, for reasons of national security. Now that I think about it, maybe it wasn’t our national security I was protecting, but no matter.

I had to set up the control program for the material, so I was in the know a little sooner than the rest of the air wing. I spent two days formatting diskettes for each of the plans, with all the fields for the formatted information blank. That way I could just hand out the disks when the pilots arrived, they would enter their information and we would send the text to the Fleet Headquarters for approval.

Of course, it did not work out that way. It turned into complete chaos, with twenty groups of men huddled over word processors. There were more people than targets, and additional disks were introduced so everyone could work, and then their were multiple versions of all the plans, and edits were being made to plans that had been superseded and no one had slept in a couple days and we were halfway across the Atlantic, and I finally had to shout for silence in the little steel box where we worked, and confiscate all the magnetic media and throw the pilots out and sort through everything to find the latest versions of the plans and start from a new baseline.

I am not in the same sort of complete chaos thing morning, and I have no nuclear weapons in the unit, though if I did, I would not be permitted to confirm or deny it.

That was how we lived back in the day. As of the moment, I only have to deal with internet versions of the articles for the Periodical, and the versions of the previous Editor, who writes more elegantly than I do, and the version I did myself. Plus all the picture files that have to be dropped into the articles.

Software has evolved, and I can sort by when the files were modified, though I have to be careful about what folder they went to, and who fiddled with what at any given point. It requires attention to detail, and a careful and measured approach.

Considering the irony of the fact that I suffer from a sort of attention deficit disorder, it is remarkable that I was in the nuclear strike business for so long. So I am drinking coffee, and thinking about something else.

It is Karen Hughes, of course. She is back in town and there was a big announcement in the paper this morning that I read when I should have been doing something else.

Karen was part of the Iron Triangle that brought George Bush to the Presidency. With Karl Rove and Joe Allbaugh, they formed the vanguard of the Bush strategic and media approaches to governing America , and formulating the response to the Global War on Terror after 9/11.

Karl is still on the job at the White House, since it looks like they will not pin the leak of a CIA agent’s identity on him. Karen went home after the last election, to spend more time with her husband and family.

Joe was named the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the first Bush Administration, and that was the capacity in which I dined with him in a place I can’t talk about.

I don’t remember what we ate, though I suspect it was a cutlet of some sort. His hair was amazing, sprouting straight up for an inch or so, and lopped off flat with the precision of a manicured English hedge.

He said his coiffeur was not a crew cut, but a “Flat Top,” radical in its severity. He wore big prescription aviator-style glasses. He seemed like a nice enough guy, and I was mildly surprised to be seated next him, though considering the location, it could have been the White Rabbit on the other side.

Joe was highly regarded, though he is a lobbyist like me now, and hence, not to be trusted.

Karen had been director of communications for Governor Bush and later in the White House. She had come to the communications business through journalism, being a local reporter for more than seven years. She covered murders, hurricanes and meetings of the school board and the Austin City Council. It was through that connection that she caught the political bug, and she wound up becoming one of the strong shoulders that young George W leaned on.

When she was not communicating the strategic vision of the President of the United States , she teaches Sunday school and serves as an elder at her Presbyterian congregation back in Texas . She is married to Jerry Hughes, an Austin attorney, and has a step-daughter in her early thirties and a son who is eighteen this year.

He is the reason she bailed out of the White House to return to Texas two years ago. She felt he needed her, and now that he is off to college, she is returning to the fray.

She was confirmed as the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy a month ago, a job that Secretary Rice and the President had claimed was vital to be filled nine months ago. But the job was reserved for Karen.

Family obligations complete for this season, she is now on the job. The first big announcement was that she plans to set up “rapid response” media teams to counter unfortunate news in the Middle East and elsewhere. I have seen outfits like this before, I won’t say where, but they employ bright young people to constantly surf the media, and pounce on stories of interest and put out countering information so fast that the public perception is changing before the original story gets legs.

It is a very pro-active strategy, lifted direct from the campaign playbook. It is part of what the Administration is calling “an aggressive drive to repair America ‘s poor image abroad, particularly in Muslim countries.”

The Secretary is right behind Karen on this. The Post quotes Dr. Rice as saying the units will “deal with misinformation and misinterpretation.”

It is about time. Waiting for the Washington news cycle to drive global opinion has meant that the Middle East was going to bed about the time the media response was coordinated and launched in North America . By the time it got anywhere, it was yesterday’s news.

Karen is going to set up an interagency group to coordinate the public message. I am not sure that State is the place for it, any more than Defense was, which was where I tilted at my windmills a couple years ago. If she can run the interagency process with cooperation from the senior public affairs officials at the Pentagon, and actually change the culture of the Foreign Service, it might work.

Foreign Service Officers, (FSO’s) are the State Department equivalent of the commissioned Military Officer. One of the four specialty areas is the “political officer,” and this is where Karen needs to make her impact. She wants them to be more media-savvy, and aggressive about how they get the word out.

Presumably, the message will come from the rapid reaction teams so the Political Officers won’t have to figure it out by themselves. There are some other important initiatives, but this is a good enough one to start the week.

Ms. Hughes has some interesting help. Her deputy is Dina Powell, another one of those strong women from Texas . She has dark smoldering eyes, and came up through Congressional Affairs, which is one of the career fast tracks in town. She is a candidate for future Iron Triangle operations, since she came to State from being the Director of White House Personnel. Every political appointee in the Administration either owes her something or knows her. And there is more. Dina was born in Cairo , and she speaks Arabic.

So it is Condy, Karen and Dina versus the State Department. We’ll see how it goes. I wish them success.

Karen is being mum on her next steps to improve America ‘s image overseas. I think it is a little like Secretary Chertoff over at DHS, who is mulling over how to secure the Border. He says he has a plan, but it needs a little coordination before he can talk about it. That is entirely possible, though it generally means that there is panic in some policy shop, somewhere high up in one of the buildings downtown. Karen probably needs a little time to work on her strategic framework.

Better late than never, I always say.

I know I would like to look at all the plans that currently exist, and all the disasters, and make sure I have the latest version in front of me. But I wonder if they have thought about bumper-stickers?

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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