How to Sell America.(International Edition; WORLD AFFAIRS)

Byline: Adam B. Kushner; With Michael Miller in New York

Washington's head of public diplomacy is one Bush official Obama would do very well to keep.

James K. Glassman, as they say in Washington, gets it. The under secretary of state for public diplomacy has been on the job for only six months, but he has already scored small successes in the U.S. effort to win over "hearts and minds" in the Muslim world, a hard sell if ever there was one. Glassman has largely shelved the strategy of his predecessor, Karen Hughes, another onetime journalist, who waged this battle as an ad campaign, flooding the unreceptive market with positive "messages" about the United States. Glassman is out to halt radicalism, and he is fighting the war of ideas in small and diverse ways: private-sector partnerships to teach English; conferences where liberals from around the world can swap ideas; social networks on the Internet that teach the virtues of democracy by rewarding the best Web video on the subject. Glassman has "been very strong," says a senior State Department official who didn't want to be quoted knocking Hughes.

Unlike his failed predecessors, Glassman has finally figured out how to sell the American idea abroad. Washington insiders see him as an intellectual cousin of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has said that "we know we cannot kill or capture our way to victory." And President-elect Obama would be smart to keep Glassman, as he kept Gates, because he needs a subtle hand in this tricky post.

Gone are the days when public diplomacy meant countering Soviet propaganda with the American version. After the Cold War, the State Department shifted to image making. Hughes, Bush's campaign confidante, was picked to run the Office of Public Diplomacy in 2005 and ran it like a campaign, "trying to broadcast positive messages about the United States," says Matthew Waxman, deputy director of the State Department's Policy Planning department from 2005 to 2007. Her people blasted a daily two-page memo with talking points to U.S. diplomats. In one memorable debacle, she was heckled by Saudi women who resented her assumption that they wanted U.S.-style freedoms.

Glassman was not known for subtlety before he took this job. As a journalist he was most famous for predicting at the height of the dotcom bubble that the Dow would reach 36,000. Yet in his new post he has dropped the hype and decided that the best way to sell American values is to let others do it for him. Instead of lecturing Colombian liberals about the shortcomings of the FARC, he silently supported Oscar Morales, who started a Facebook group against ...