More on Bush PR Maven Hughes’ Departure

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Slate‘s Fred Kaplan weighs in on Karen Hughes’ decision to quit her job as undersecretary of state to burnish America’s image abroad and return to Texas:

It may be that, as [Hughes] focused more on the substance and less on the flash, she realized that what she’d been asked to do simply couldn’t be done. If the measure of success was how well she was selling U.S. policy, she was failing because there was no good story to sell.

“My guess is that the next year is going to be brutal for anyone doing ‘message’ control and with the elections they will be irrelevant as well,” a recent Foggy Bottom denizen explains Hughes departure to me. “Life is too short, so she threw in the towel.”