Upcoming McClellan Memoir Blasts Bush, Rove, White House

When he was the Bush White House’s press secretary, Scott McClellan took a lot heat and some analysts thought he showed every single sweat gland of it. Next week McClellan has a new memoir coming out, and according to reports President George Bush and the White House might begin sweating a bit — because they’re going to have to go into full damage/discredit control on this one: it is reportedly scathing.

According to the Politico, the book “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” will add to growing archive of published information on the Bush administration’s credibility gap — and how it starts at the top. The Politico reports:

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

To be sure, McClellan had one of the world’s toughest jobs. There had already been a controversy over this book in November, and McClellan had pulled back…slightly. In November, Salon wrote:

Scott McClellan, the former Bush press secretary famed for his robotic stylings, repetitive sophistry and rejection of candor, has at last turned on the powerful men who made him. Evidently he now claims to have grown weary of playing the patsy for their crimes and misdemeanors.

In a short, tantalizing excerpt from his forthcoming memoir posted on the Web site of Public Affairs Press, McClellan complains that he was duped into misleading the public and the media. Although the excerpt does not mention Valerie Plame, it clearly refers to her whispered exposure as a CIA agent by ranking aides to President Bush and Vice President Cheney…

By press time today, he had called his own probity into question again, in fact, when his publisher partially retracted the incriminating excerpt in an interview with Bloomberg News. According to Peter Osnos of Public Affairs, McClellan didn’t mean to say that Bush deliberately lied to him about Libby’s and Rove’s involvement in the Plame leak.

But perhaps now, as polls show Bush has clearly entered the records as one of the most unpopular and inept Presidents in American history, McClellan will be less defensive (having Bush administration press spokesman on your resume may open some doors but it will close some others…).

He had a long history of working for Bush, but became press secretary at one of the most thankless times to hold that job: when the credibility Bush had enjoyed with much of the American public after 911 began to disintegrate, when his assertions on the Valerie Plame affair sandbagged McClellan’s own credibility, and when his awkward, sometimes sweaty appearances battling the press were deemed inept by many Republicans.

When he quit, let’s just say that if reviews of his job performance had been reviews of a director’s movie, that director would never work in the movie business again.

The great journalism professor/blogger Jay Rosen (in a post that needs to be read in full) was thoughtful and polite. Here’s part of it:

So this is the first thing to understand about McClellan and the job he was given by Bush. He wasn’t put there to brief the White House press, but to frustrate, and belittle it, and provoke journalists into discrediting themselves on TV. The very premise of a White House “communications” office gets in the way of understanding the strategy that prevailed from July 2003, when McClellan took over from Ari Fleischer, until this week, when he announced his resignation.

McClellan’s specialty was non-communication; what’s remarkable about him as a choice for press secretary is that he had no special talent for explaining Bush’s policies to the world. In fact, he usually made things less clear by talking about them. We have to assume that this is the way the President wanted it; and if we do assume that it forces us to ask: why use a bad explainer and a rotten communicator as your spokesman before the entire world? Isn’t that just dumb— and bad politics? Wouldn’t it be suicidal in a media-driven age with its 24-hour news cycle?

You would think so, but if the goal is to skate through unquestioned—because the gaps in your explanations are so large to start with—then to refuse to explain is a demonstration of raw presidential power. (As in “never apologize, never explain.”) So this is another reason McClellan was there. Not to be persuasive, but to refute the assumption that there was anyone the White House needed or wanted to persuade— least of all the press! Politics demands assent, on one hand, and attack on the other. (And those are your choices with Bush and Rove: assent or be attacked.) The very notion of persuasion conceded more to democratic politics than the Bush forces wanted to concede.

McClellan was replaced by super-smooth Tony Snow of Fox News. And Snow was immediately hailed as having been a more convincing and capable face for the Bush administration compared to awkward you-know-who.

It’ll be interesting to see how his book will be received by the White House.

If past books and assertions by former officials who broke with the administration are any indication, the White House will either try to dismiss his allegations, belittle it as not saying much, or discredit him as a disgruntled former employee (apparently uncomplaining employees are the “gruntled” ones..), either directly or through surrogates.

Now the question is: will he wind up on CBS’ 60 Minutes, NBC’s Dateline or some other big glitzy network show? Will he be on Larry King? The Today Show?

The book will likely have an immediate political impact.

In the long term, it adds to the significant — and increasingly vast — library of news stories and printed materials documenting how the Bush administration’s credibility problems are on a par (some would say if you spread it out in terms of timeline and issues involved it, surpasses) Johnson and Nixon administrations’ infamous credibility problems.

How does this create an immediate problem?

Presumptive GOP nominee Senator John McCain is now doing the political equivalent of trying to walk on hot coals and do the limbo as he holds a fundraiser with President George Bush (press access strictly curtailed) and discreetly distance himself enough from Bush so that he shows he’s independent yet doesn’t upset the part of the Republican party that is still pro-Bush. McCain may be sweating a bit if the book gets big media play next week…