Rice unconcerned by freelance campaign diplomacy

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has a coffee with Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, unseen, in Perth, Western Australia Friday, July 25, 2008. Rice is making a brief semiformal visit to Australia at the invitation of Smith, who gave her a personal tour of his favorite sites in Perth. (AP Photo/John Mokrzycki, POOL)

PERTH, Australia—If Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is worried that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is complicating the Bush administration's foreign policy with freelance campaign diplomacy, she isn't showing it.

In her first public comments about Obama's overseas jaunt during which he has contrasted his international approach to that of President Bush in meetings with foreign officials, Rice said the trip was part of the election cycle and would not affect the administration.

"Everybody knows that we are in a presidential campaign, so this a part of America's democratic process," Rice told reporters aboard her plane as she flew from an Asian security conference in Singapore to Australia.

"Sen. Obama is a senator, let's remember. He sits on the Foreign Relations Committee and he is a candidate for president. He is all of those things," she said. "But he has said, and we continue to act on the basis, as do our foreign partners, that this government remains in power until January 2009."

Rice last week reminded U.S. Embassy staff around the world that they should provide only minimal assistance to candidates on campaign trips abroad, but she noted that both Obama and Republican hopeful John McCain had pledged not to run a shadow foreign policy on the stump.

They "have made very clear that there is one president of the United States at a time and that they respect that," she said.

"Meetings with foreign leaders will take place, meetings with foreign secretaries will take place. We obviously have no objection to that," Rice added. "We're continuing to do the business of government and the administration has a very heavy agenda between now and the end of the year."

Even in Bush's few remaining months in office, Rice said, the president was pursuing numerous ambitious foreign policy goals, including diplomatic efforts on Iran and North Korea's nuclear programs, Middle East peace and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She noted that last week the administration had broken with past policy to send a top U.S. diplomat to talks with a senior Iranian envoy, that she on Wednesday had met for the first time with North Korea's foreign minister, and that she will see Israeli and Palestinian peace negotiators next week in Washington.

"We've demonstrated the efforts that we're making to invigorate the diplomacy ... with Iran, to invigorate and make certain that we achieve as much as we possibly can on North Korea. We do have active (Mideast) negotiations," she said.

Obama, who visited Iraq and Afghanistan over the weekend and arrived in Europe on Thursday after stops in Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, has electrified the media and the public on a trip intended to burnish his foreign policy credentials.

A fierce critic of the war in Iraq, Obama has met with leaders and senior officials at each stop and presented them with his ideas on how he would handle things if he is elected.

The headline-making trip is also aimed at setting himself apart from Bush and McCain ahead of November's election. Obama has in some locations unabashedly made what have amounted to overseas campaign appearances.