From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Karen Hughes, under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs,

and one of the last of the President's Texas Loyalists in the Inner Circle, has resigned.

Here's Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday.

When I asked Karen to come, I asked her to come and to help us make public diplomacy strong

and central to the mission of transformational diplomacy, and she has done that.

She's done it in spectacular fashion.

Heck of a job, Hughes Hughes. She's the third after

Charlotte Beers and Margaret Tuttweiler to fail at improving America's image abroad. According to Pew

Research Center numbers cited in the news this week, favorable views of the U.S. are scraping the

bottom as low as 21% in Egypt, 15% in Pakistan,

13% in the Palestinian territories, and a lowly 9% in Turkey.

But she did spectacularly double the budget.

Price Floyd was the director of media affairs under Hughes.

He knows the job and the mission. We asked him to

grade her job performance. I'll give her a B on energy and getting funding, but she'll have to get an

F on actually changing the perception of the U.S. overseas. That's depressing.

You know, one of the things that she had coming in that everyone said was this clout,

that she had the president's ear.

And now some people were saying, look, she had an impossible job.

...