Rice’s Blunt Diplomacy, Spike Heels Make People Take Notice

By ANNE GEARANAP Diplomatic Writer WASHINGTON (AP) – 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 (117,477 kilometers) 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 George W. 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.”