Rice ‘Planted’ Question With ‘Friendly Journalist’ To ‘Help Erase’ Pre-Iraq War Legacy–headline, Think Progress
Madame Secretary, after you were able to find the cure to Type-2 Diabetes and during your world concert tour which ended with your receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Order of the Knights of Minolta, will you have time to accept your party’s presidential nomination by acclamation?
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Another piece from Think Progress…
In an interview with C-SPAN’s Washington Journal today, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler, author of Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy, revealed that after President Bush promoted her to Secretary of State, Rice mounted a public relations campaign to distance herself from the pre-war fiasco.
As part of this PR campaign, she directed an aide to “plant a question” asking if she would run for President, in order to help “negate American memories of her very direct role” in invading Iraq:
She had a very deliberative public relations strategy when she became Secretary of State to help erase the images of how ineffective she had been as National Security Adviser. And I describe how one of her aides even planted a question with a friendly journalist to ask whether she would be interested in running for president — to give her the aura of someone who might have presidential aspirations, make her seem more powerful than she was.