Posted on 05/31/2008 10:19:11 AM PDT by The_Republican
Except maybe for MSNBC’s wild-eyed commentator Keith Olbermann, nobody in politics or media seems to have a good word to say for Scott McClellan, the former George W. Bush press secretary turned ferocious Bush critic.
The right complains of McClellan's disloyalty. The left complains that McClellan’s change of heart arrived too late. The old Washington hands shake their heads at a press secretary writing a book at all: FDR’s and Eisenhower’s men took their secrets to their graves — why cannot today’s whippersnappers do the same?
Yet there is something very sad and sympathetic about McClellan and the bitter, accusatory memoir that leaked out this week. (The book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, has hit number one on Amazon.com’s sales chart despite the fact that it won’t be officially released till next week.)
If you ever watched McClellan’s televised confrontations with the savage White House press corps, you probably thought: This is terrible! The man has no business being up there. He looks frightened, like a schoolboy trying to retrieve his mittens from a persecuting gang of bullies. His words stumble and clomber. When he has good news to announce, he cannot elicit any interest; when the news is bad, his clumsy efforts to evade questions only draw more attention than ever.
As the current press secretary Dana Perino daily reminds us, you don’t have to be a genius to succeed as press secretary. But you do need (1) composure under fire, (2) verbal fluency, (3) an understanding of the imperatives of the news business and (4) access to the interior workings of the administration. McClellan never possessed qualities (1) and (2), and his colleagues refused to grant him (4).
In these deficiencies, McClellan was not alone. George W. Bush brought most of his White House team with him from Texas. Except for Karl Rove, these Texans were a strikingly inadequate bunch. Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzalez, Karen Hughes, Al Hawkins, Andy Card (the last not a Texan, but a lifelong Bush family retainer) — they were more like characters from The Office than the sort of people one would expect to find at the supreme height of government in the world’s most powerful nation. McClellan, too, started in Bush’s governor’s office, and if he never belonged to the innermost circle of power, he nonetheless gained closer proximity than would be available to almost anyone who did not first serve in Texas.
That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent. But that did not happen often with the Bush team.
Bush demanded a very personal kind of loyalty, a loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to him and his own career. Perhaps unconsciously, he tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning. (Robert Draper, whose book Dead Certain offers a vivid picture of the pre-presidential Bush, tells the story of a 1999 campaign-strategy meeting at which Bush shut Karl Rove up by ordering him to “hang up my jacket.” The room fell silent in shock — but Rove did it.)
These little abuses would often be followed by unexpected acts of thoughtfulness and generosity. Yet the combination of the demand for personal loyalty, the bullying and the ensuing compensatory love-bombing was to weed out strong personalities and to build an inner circle defined by a willingness to accept absolute subordination to the fluctuating needs of a tense, irascible and unpredictable chief.
Had Bush been a more active manager, these subordinated personalities might have done him less harm. But after choosing people he could dominate, he then delegated them enormous power. He created a closed loop in which the people entrusted with the most responsibility were precisely those who most dreaded responsibility — Condoleezza Rice being the most important and most damaging example.
Yet as the proverb warns us, even worms will turn.
For three years, Bush left Scott McClellan in a position for which he was unsuited and in which he must have suffered terrible anxiety and stress. Finally, McClellan was deputed to act as the administration’s shield and buffer in the Valerie Plame leak case. The administration had nothing to fear from the truth, but McClellan was assigned to say things that later proved untrue. Understandably, he feels terrible bitterness about the episode — and predictably, a book publisher offered him the opportunity to exact his revenge.
The lesson of this story is emphatically not that presidents should seek staffers even more fanatically loyal than Bush’s. The lesson is that weak personalities break under pressure. And since a White House is the world’s highest-pressure environment, a wise president will seek to staff it with strong personalities.
To recruit and hold strong personalities, a president must demand something more than personal loyalty. He must offer a compelling vision and ideal — a cause that people can serve without feeling servile. Otherwise a president will only get … what Bush has now got.
The classic example was A. Lincoln, who put each of his bitter rivals for the Republican nomination in his cabinet. With one exception, they became loyal Lincoln men, despite initially believing they were smarter and better than he was.
i guess the democrat media cannot call
mclellan a “bush loyalist”.
Fascinating. And persuasive. Much of this has been all too obvious—especially Miers and Gonzalez—but some of the details here are new to me, and I think believable.
This is a good piece.
I agree that McClellan was not up to the press secretary’s job. That’s about all that can be said.
There’s a time to choose loyalty as the defining characteristic of one’s inner circle. I imagine it was GHWBush Sr. who advised that, and I’d expect the son took that advice.
I wonder what made it the paramount concern.....
McClellan's inadequacies allowed the left to run further with their phony narrative and do far more damage than otherwise. His tenure seemed to coincide with the weakening of the Bush presidency. As a supporter of Bush I was dismayed by such a lousy hire...wasn't anyone else willing to take the job at the time?
Surprised to read this...
au contraire, it's called a Civil War. It has happened once, maybe not again in our lifetime, but certainly a possibility.
While Bush requests loyalty he also gives it, many times with bad results. Harriet Miers is another example.
I guess so. When Bush brought the wretched Canadian opportunist David Frum to the White House he probably did get what he deserved.
McClellan is Frum's Mr. Hyde, or double, or shadow, the creature who acts out his own impulses in a much cruder and debased form.
Frum has that "bicyclist personality." He bows down before people above him who can do him some service, and kicks those below him, because he can get away with it.
So do I....very persuasive/insightful.
I’ll surely be saying good riddance to Bush & friends and will be voting for Bob Barr.
Soros got what he paid for.
Sad but true. While I liked Rumsfeld’s demeanor and such, it has now been proven that, while we had a perfect force to take over Iraq, there was refusal to insert a far larger force to overwhelm and occupy.
Ironically we needed more occupation, not less, in the beginning.
It isn’t so much that a mistake was made, it is that no alternate “what if” scenario was considered. The Surge is working, but it is occurring a LOT later than it should.
It is usually better to rip off a bandaid and endure the pain than to pull it off slowly. In other words, it would have been better to endure the wrath of the media and left over a “too large” force and more aggressive strategy to save the drip drip drip of news for 4 years.
Also, after Bush won in 2004, it was like he just quit caring about the PR side of things. They didn’t do a great job before that, but after they won the election, they let the media and democrats hit the reset button on Iraq and after 2 years it “took”.
Then there is the failure to rip the bandaid off during Katrina. You invoke the Insurrection act and “invade” New Orleans. Taking all the “attacking black people” blame and overriding a Democratic Gov is tame in comparison to the tanking his approval did.
Katrina was the final death letter to W’s approval rating for the foreseeable future. It isn’t right, because it isn’t his fault, but he also failed to take the bull by the horns and foresee. Anyone could see that the Dems were playing politics before the storm and just after, along with incompetence.
I still think History will judge W better because in 50 years we will probably find out a lot more about the reality of Iraq, Al Q et al. If Obama doesn’t get in and ruin the WoT, W should recover historically, but not anytime soon.
the upside with electing governors is that they tend to be better managers from experience - at least you could tell whether they did it well previously or not.
the downside to governors it that they bring the team to D.C. that helped them get to the state capitol and those people are often not ready for prime time. And how do you dump the people who got you where you are in place of somebody else with great credential that doesn’t know you and that you don’t know from Adam.
And Obama will be bringing with him the corrupt mob from Chicago. Can anybody think of something worse? Maybe if Ray Nagin were the Presidential frontrunner....
But all of this is 20/20 hindsight. Frum ought to know better. You don’t kick a guy when he is down or shot his dog.
I don’t excuse McClellan. He was a lousy press secretary, as we all saidd at the time. But why did Bush give him the job, or keep him on after it was evident he couldn’t do it?
As for wanting loyal subordinates, I don’t fault Bush at all on that. But IF this is true, maybe he doesn’t really understand what loyalty means. Loyalty means doing your best for someone, not licking their toes and doing whatever they say. If the boss tells you to do something stupid, then a truly loyal person should say, “NO, that’s not in your best interest.”
Bush seems to have promoted some of these insiders into jobs they simply couldn’t do. Harriet Miers did a good job of choosing SCOTUS candidates, but she was not a suitable candidate herself. No doubt Gonzalez also did some good stuff, but he was not a suitable candidate for AG or—thank God it never happened—for SCOTUS. Probably McClellan did some good, loyal work, too, but he was simply unqualified and unsuited to be a press secretary.
Then, again, I’ve often said that Bush was not ENOUGH concerned about loyalty. Why on earth did he keep Tenet on? Or all those troublemakers at the top echelons of the CIA and the FBI? Why did he let that head scientist of his who pumps for global warming get so far out of control?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.