Rebranding America
It is hard to imagine that the State Department’s Public Diplomacy efforts could go downhill from where they were under former Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs Charlotte Beers. SCRAPBOOK readers may remember Beers as the Uncle Ben’s Rice advertising guru who began her new job a month after the September 11 attacks. Even as President Bush promised to “hunt down” the terrorists, Beers sought to soften America’s image.
“It’s almost as if we have to redefine what America is,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “This is the most sophisticated brand assignment I have ever had.”
If Brand USA had had a slogan in the Middle East, it would have been something along these lines: Please, be nice to us. We’re nice to you. To underscore that last point, Beers included in State Department literature testimonials from terrorist sympathizers such as Nihad Awad, head of the Council on American Islamic Relations, who had previously declared: “I am in support of the Hamas movement.”
For these reasons, when Beers announced her resignation last March, THE SCRAPBOOK looked forward to regime change in State’s public diplomacy shop. Margaret Tutwiler, an experienced GOP communications guru, was confirmed two months ago as Beers’s successor. At a congressional hearing on February 10, she laid out her vision for U.S. public diplomacy. Our optimism was short-lived.
Young people, Tutwiler declared, “are the key to a future peaceful world.” America’s “strategic goals” are clear: “We need to focus on those areas of the world where there has been a deterioration of the view of our nation. That deterioration is most stark in the Arab and Muslim world. At the same time, we must work equally as hard in those areas where the opinion of the United States has not changed to date.” Leaving aside the logistical problems with placing our “focus” on one part of the world and working “equally as hard” in the others, Tutwiler misdiagnoses the chief problem with American public diplomacy.
“Effective policy advocacy remains a priority, and I believe we basically do a good job of advocating our policies and explaining our actions,” she said.
Many of those on the receiving end of U.S. public diplomacy efforts, particularly advocates for democracy throughout the Arab and Muslim world, would strenuously disagree. Too many of those paid to advocate U.S. policy openly disagree with it. And rather than explain our actions, they try to explain them away.
Someone who gets it is Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. In testimony he gave a week after Tutwiler’s lackluster performance, Tomlinson articulated the proper goal of public diplomacy: “It is very important that government spokesmen take America’s message to the world–passionately and relentlessly. We should not be ashamed of public advocacy on behalf of freedom and democracy and the United States of America.”
Great Moments in PR
“It has come to our attention that there is a rumor circulating in cyberspace that [Bill Moyers’s PBS show] ‘Now’ is under threat of cancellation because of pressure from our critics. It’s not true and we have no idea how the rumor began to circulate. PBS has funded NOW through 2004 and we are steaming forward with production.”
(from the weekly newsletter of “Now with Bill Moyers,” February 5)
“Bill Moyers, whose weekly magazine ‘Now’ on PBS has capped a 30-year career in TV journalism, is leaving the broadcast after the November elections.
“His next venture: Writing a long-proposed book about Lyndon Johnson, whom he served before and during Johnson’s presidency.
“‘It isn’t because I feel old,’ Moyers, 69, told the Associated Press of his decision, which he made official [Feb. 19]. ‘It’s because I feel compelled to do something else now, that only I can do–which is that book.'”
(“Journalist Bill Moyers to Leave PBS,” Associated Press, February 20)
Unpopular Filibusters
President Bush made his second recess appointment to the federal courts on February 20, installing Alabama attorney general William Pryor on the 11th Circuit during Congress’s President’s Day vacation. Like Mississippi judge Charles Pickering, whom Bush elevated to the federal bench over the Christmas holiday, Pryor had been the victim of a Democratic filibuster, which prevented a vote on his nomination.
There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Senate Democrats when the White House’s procedural end run triumphed over the Democrats’ procedural barricade. (“Actions like this show the American people that this White House will stop at nothing to try to turn the independent federal judiciary into an arm of the Republican party,” harrumphed Vermont’s Patrick Leahy.) But the new “Red States/Blue States” Zogby poll suggests this can be a winning issue for the White House.
Here’s the question Zogby asked a national sample of likely voters: “The Constitution provides the president with the power to nominate justices to the federal bench while the U.S. Senate has the power to ‘advise and consent.’ In that role, the Senate has always confirmed judicial nominees by a simple majority of votes–a requirement upheld by a Supreme Court ruling. During the Bush presidency, Democrats used, on six occasions, the threat of a filibuster to block confirmation of some of Bush’s judicial nominees. The Constitution expressly provides that supermajority voting requirements are to be used for treaties and constitutional amendments.”
Their finding: “Fifty-three percent of Blue State and 59 percent of Red State voters felt the Democratic filibuster of judicial nominees was wrong, while 35 percent of Blue State and 32 percent of Red State voters feel a minority of Senators are right to use whatever means necessary to block the nominees.”
The polling suggests a bipartisan unhappiness with the filibuster. The results, the Zogby press release noted, were “consistent with polling results under President Clinton when voters rejected Republican efforts to block judicial nominees.”
EU to UK: Less Work, Please
The reason for Europe’s economic woes is never far to seek. The European Parliament has now warned Brits to stop working so much. When the European Commission launched a massive review of its “Working Time Directive” last month, it discovered that “approximately 4 million people, or 16 percent of the [U.K.] workforce, currently work more than 48 hours per week,” the maximum average work time in European countries.
Workers can choose to opt out of the 48-hour week maximum. About a third of British workers have signed the opt-out, an option that has gone almost completely unused in other E.U. countries. The European Parliament has passed a nonbinding resolution calling on the Commission to stop what it calls a “widespread and systematic abuse of the directive” in the U.K.
It’s been said that Euro law is dreamed up by the French, written by the Germans, enforced by the British–and ignored by the Italians. It may be time to rewrite the joke.
