Deep in the Heart Of Washington – (Did Karen Ever Leave?)

[kskiska]

Karen Hughes Returned To Texas but She Kept Her Foot in Right Here

This time around Karen Hughes is just a visitor here, right? In and out in a couple of days just to promote her new book, a hotel key secure in her purse. Husband Jerry is for once by her side, joking with their old neighbors. Her son Robert is at home, his real home, in Austin, thinking about his next high school baseball game, waiting for his mom to come home and just "be myself," as she tells the crowd at her book party in the St. Regis Hotel.

Yet somehow the White House keeps calling her back. Here comes Condoleezza Rice, heading into what must be the most stressful week of her life, looking somewhat tense amid this gaily chattering crowd. So Hughes comes to the rescue -- "Condi, you must be exhausted," and offers to take her to dinner later so they can go over her testimony for the 9/11 commission.

(snip)

"The woman who left the White House to put family first and moved back home to Texas," the book cover reads. So you can forgive women for leaving Hughes's book signings a little weepy, moved and relieved that they might find a way out, too. Women such as Amy Habib, torn between a husband who lives in New York and a job here at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who after a book signing barely holds back tears as she talks about Hughes: "She struggled to balance these two lives and then she just followed her heart."

And yet that is not quite the right reading of Hughes, 47. In fact, like many workaholics, she's somewhat offended by that notion. "People would ask me, 'How's retirement?' They thought I was quitting everything. I'm going back to Texas, but that doesn't mean I don't work quite hard because I do." And then she adds: "I'm not sure I ever left."

(snip)

How to explain the double message? The shorthand is an easier way to package a book. "The woman who left the White House to put family first" is catchier and more dramatic than "the woman who never quite left but just changed her address and telecommuted."

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A369-2004Apr9.html

[Gloria]

1. I remember just as she left, reading a story

which stated quite clearly that she was going to be working from TX....and was on the phone everyday with the White House.

Another phony image being pushed for the gullible...that spin that she was leaving for family, was and still is just another lie.

[kskiska]

2. She was put on the RNC payroll

and was making even more than in the White House. The "leaving" story was spun so successfully that everyone still believes it – Hughes believes it too. Funny, but now she's "leaving" that very same family – again – and even leaving open the possibility of returning for a second term.

[scottxyz]

3. Deep in the bowels

of Foggy Bottom

[Old and In the Way]

4. A bone for the gullible RW Religious fundies. They east this shit up.

nt

[xchrom]

5. amen