03:33 pm
Awesome Redux!
Our friends over at Dipnote have your complete Hillary awesomeness coverage, including links to the YouTube videos:
Gotta say that Hillary doesn’t exactly look at home, does she? Most honest moment: “When the President asked me to be Secretary of State, I was very surprised.” But she does a pretty good job of hangin’ with the kids, and I really liked her discussion of what it’s like to lose — in a new democracy like Indonesia, her point is an important one.
Kudos to the one interviewer who asked her perspective on U.S. relations with Muslim countries, what it was like to support Obama after opposing him, and what she would say to Indonesians who are angry about “U.S. policy toward the Middle East.”
In all seriousness, this isn’t a bad bit of public diplomacy — appear on a program popular with young Indonesians and talk about the importance of good U.S-Indonesian relations, in the process using your own experiences to explain the relevance of the American experience to what is happening there.
Of course, as Marc Lynch has noted, public relations blitzes, should be only one very small part of U.S. public diplomacy. But between this and Obama’s interview with Al Arabiya, it’s pretty clear that the new Administration gets it. Now all they need to do is appoint an Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs that can make “smart power” more than a few television appearances..