Rice manages to keep positive image in polls

For a variety of reasons, she hasn't suffered the fate of her boss, President Bush.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has become the most popular member of the Bush administration and a potential candidate to succeed her boss in the White House, even as Americans lose confidence in the president she serves and patience with the Iraq war she helped launch.
Entering her second year as the country's senior diplomat and foreign policy spokeswoman, Rice has improbably shed much of her image as the hawkish "warrior princess" at President Bush's side. The nickname was reportedly bestowed by her staff at the White House National Security Council, where Rice was an intimate member of Bush's first-term war council.
Rice resolutely defends the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism and the expansive executive powers that Bush claims came with it. She has lately sounded more optimistic than Bush about the progress of the Iraq war and the future for that country.
Yet, it is unusual to hear anyone talk about Rice as an architect of either of those two defining undertakings of the Bush presidency.
Maintains popularity
By a mix of charm, luck and physical distance from the White House, Rice has managed to escape the fate of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who saw their public approval ratings fall to historic lows before rebounding slightly recently.
Kurt Campbell, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, credits Rice's heavy travel schedule, an approach to diplomacy that is more pragmatic than other Bush advisers, and a measure of personal pluck.
"She appears to have sort of skated away" from controversies over U.S. intelligence failures and aggressive U.S. tactics in the hunt for terrorists, Campbell said, and from the perception that the United States is "slogging" along in Iraq.
"She appears at once to be close to the president but separate and detached from some of the foibles of the administration, and that's a very hard thing to pull off," he said.
Rice was as strong a public voice as any for going to war in Iraq. She once famously warned of Saddam Hussein's presumed weapons of mass destruction: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Survey results
Although Rice's first-term record on Iraq, terrorism and other subjects made for a contentious Senate confirmation hearing last January, most Americans apparently do not hold her personally responsible.
A Pew Research survey in October found that 60 percent of respondents held either a very favorable or mostly favorable view of Rice, while 25 percent had a very or mostly unfavorable view -- numbers others in the Bush administration can only envy.
Shortly after ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was captured two years ago, 64 percent of respondents said the Iraq war was the right thing to do. An poll this month showed that only 42 percent now say it was the right decision, and support has also dropped for staying in Iraq until the country is stabilized.
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