Tweet of Approval: Bush-Era Public Diplomat Likes Obama Nominee

Nancy Scola | April 28, 2009 - 11:09am | 3 comments | Email This!

Google Image Result for http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Colleen_Graffy_official.jpgHow people learned about the internal wranglings over diplomatic nominations in the dark and dank pre-Twitter era, well, beats me. You picked up a phone and questioned sources or something? Dunno. But, thankfully, we have the Twitter, and the Twitter tells us that one Bush-era diplomat most closely associated with State's new media efforts has expressed (reserved) approval for a criticized member of Hillary Clinton's new flotilla of diplomats. Colleen Graffy was the Deputy Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, and was perhaps best known to many of us as being a freewheeling Twitterer. Graffy earned the mocking of the Washington Post's arbiter of good Washington behavior, Al Kamen, for tweeting about her sartorial dilemmas while packing for a diplomatic jaunt to Iceland and other open musings. Graffy left State during the Obama transition, as did her boss, James Glassman. Nominated to replace Glassman is a Clinton ally and fundraiser by the name of Judith McHale. There have been some grumblings amongst public diplomacy advocates that McHale -- a marketer and corporate executive by background -- was the wrong fit for a job that, under Glassman at least, engaging laterally with the global community and doing it on occasion through new media like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Graffy, though, is offering up a tentative seal of approval on McHale's nomination to succeed her old boss. "Very good meeting w U/S Designate Judith McHale to talk re Public Diplomacy at the State Dept," she tweeted. "She might be exactly who we need 4 that job."

(Photograph of Colleen Graffy courtesy of the State Department)

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Comments

Full Disclosure on the Twitter

by Colleen Graffy on April 29, 2009 - 12:08am

Dear Nancy,

Those in the know about Public Diplomacy at the State Department would actually cite such things as: The Media Hub in Brussels, Visual Communications and Green Diplomacy as some of my contributions to PD--rather than Twitter.

But, if one is going to mention it, it would be helpful to disclose more than the Al Kamen typical slant since the real story was the enthusiastic response and support of the Twitter Community and others to my use of new media. This type of support has been essential to the development of open government via the internet.

It also would have been a nice balance to include not only the Kamen hit piece but my Op-Ed in the Washington Post in response which can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/7ebonh

Other "musings" could have included some of my tweets with links to video and images that introduced the American public to the public diplomacy work that our embassies are doing in Europe and Eurasia or, better yet, to have included your own response to the Kamen piece at that time which was supportive of me and critical of him which I quoted in a tweet here:

@nancyscola u can say "drop the Al Kamen's of the world from the equation, not openness" but I couldn't possibly.

Yours truly,
Colleen

Context, not really critique

by Nancy Scola on April 30, 2009 - 1:29pm

Colleen -- I really appreciate you coming to the blog like this, and I've read and absorbed your comments. But I think maybe there's a risk of reading too much into the few sentences of context I provided to provide a setting for that little bit of news about the new under secretary. The hard time given you for your use of Twitter is, in my judgment, a way to trigger in readers' minds the fuller scope of what you attempted to do on the public diplomacy front. Nobody -- well, besides Al Kamen, perhaps -- would suspect that you spent all your days at the State Department sitting behind a desk and tweeting. In fact, nobody following your Twitter stream could think that. I remember some super interesting stuff you posted about arriving in a some country somewhere and already having instant connections with local people there because of the outreach and engagement you had already done online.

I've written again and again on public diplomacy because I think it's a very knowable and human way to approach diplomatic engagement. I admit that I have plenty to learn! To that end, I've been reaching out to people currently at the State Department. It doesn't make me happy to know that that context read to you as a dig at the online aspects of that work, but I don't know that it was entirely warranted.

to collent

by icqfullpatch on May 27, 2009 - 5:24pm

I really appreciate you coming to the blog like this, and I've read and absorbed your comments. But I think maybe there's a risk of reading too much into the few sentences of context I provided to provide a setting for that little bit of news about the new under secretary. The hard time given you for your use of Twitter is, in my judgment, a way to trigger in readers' minds the fuller scope of what you attempted to do on the public diplomacy front. Nobody -- well, besides Al Kamen, perhaps -- would suspect that you spent all your days at the State Department sitting behind a desk and tweeting. In fact, nobody following your Twitter stream could think that. I remember some super interesting stuff you posted about arriving in a some country somewhere and already having instant connections with local people there because of the outreach and engagement you had already done online.

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