Being America’s conveyor belt to hearts and minds during this Administration is, and always was, an arguably un-doable job. Karen Hughes’ performance only made it worse.

But not to George W. Bush. At Hughes’ farewell ceremony, the president said, "She is a consequential person. And I am confident that she has begun a cultural change throughout our State Department that will stand in good stead; it'll help the country."

But, as Dan Froomkin pointed out in the Washington Post, “Hughes wasn't hired to create cultural change inside the State Department; she was hired to improve America's image abroad. And she failed miserably at that task, at least in part because she failed to use her close relationship with Bush to get him to stop doing the things that made her job so impossible.”

There is a painful irony in the reality that the country that invented modern marketing fails to understand that a flawed product won’t sell for long, if at all. I’m told that Jim Glassman is a smart guy. But if he’s so smart, why did he take this thankless job in the first place?

At the end of the day, it won’t matter. The “product” just doesn’t work. So the U.S. will continue to fail in its public diplomacy campaigns until wiser, better informed, and perhaps more humble heads occupy the Oval Office.

Back in 1928, the man most regard as “the father of public relations,” Edward L. Bernays, coined the phrase “the engineering of consent.” By which he meant that, through effective propaganda, people could be persuaded to embrace ideas or actions based on deception.

Bernays was famously successful, but he lived in a different time and in a simpler world. My guess is that if he had the U.S. as a client today, he’d resign the account.

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