Survey finds Condoleezza Rice most popular member of US administration

US 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.

This comes 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 George 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-September 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 those two defining undertakings of the Bush presidency.

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 Centre 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 US intelligence failures and aggressive US tactics in the hunt for terrorists,” Campbell said, “and from the perception that the US is “slogging” along in Iraq,” he said.

“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.”

A Pew Research survey in October found that 60% of respondents held either a very favourable or mostly favourable view of Rice, while 25% had a very or mostly unfavourable view.