How Scott Got Hot

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 2, 2008 10:26 AM

In an interview three years ago, when he was waging daily warfare against the White House press corps, Scott McClellan told me: "The media's trying to get under our skin and get us off-message."

Now it's McClellan who's gone way off-message -- and been embraced by some of his liberal media detractors, even as he is denigrated by his onetime conservative allies.

In writing a book that castigates the man he so loyally served, the former presidential press secretary is following a well-worn tell-all path, made surprising mainly because of his reputation as an unyielding George W. Bush loyalist. The media love turncoats, if only to chronicle the teeth-gnashing among the defector's old pals.

Indeed, the White House called McClellan "disgruntled," Matt Drudge branded him a "snitch," and National Review Online ran six pieces on Friday trashing him as "pasty," "maladroit," "plodding" and "shameful." Liberal pundits aren't exactly kind -- "Where's the apology?" demanded David Corn of Mother Jones -- but many have welcomed McClellan as a belated truth-teller. After all, McClellan's portrait of Bush as an inflexible, isolated leader who misled the nation into an unnecessary war matches what the left has been saying all along.

McClellan granted his first cable news interview last week to Bush-bashing MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, while Bill O'Reilly accused the ex-spokesman of initially blowing off his Fox program in favor of "far-left venues." Olbermann hailed the book, "What Happened," as "a primary document of American history" that contained "poetry." Talk about role reversal: It was Olbermann who said in 2005 that "whenever I hear Scott McClellan talking about 'media credibility,' I strain to remember who it was who admitted Jeff Gannon to the White House press room and called on him all those times." (Gannon, a conservative blogger with an X-rated past, now says "Scott McClellan's credibility is zero.")

McClellan wrote the book, says historian Michael Beschloss, knowing that "the president's opponents will pick it up and use it very zealously." And that is a tradition as old as the republic.

After George Washington fired his second secretary of state, Edmund Randolph, Beschloss says, Randolph published an anti-Washington pamphlet, but the president "was so popular that it made Randolph even more of a pariah." FDR speechwriter Raymond Moley quit and published a book attacking the New Deal.

More recently, David Stockman and Donald Regan wrote critical books about Ronald Reagan, and George Stephanopoulos and Robert Reich did so about Bill Clinton, while the presidents were still in office.

Douglas Feith, a former Pentagon official who published "War and Decision" in April, says his book, while acknowledging serious problems with the Iraq planning, is "very analytical" and basically supportive of Bush. He says he has been "punished" by having major book review publications ignore the work. "It seems journalists are more interested in vitriol than substance," Feith says.

In "What Happened," McClellan is walking away not just from the president but from his own words. Asked days after Hurricane Katrina about the charge that Bush was in denial about the rescue effort, McClellan said: "You all are well aware of how engaged this president is in the response efforts and making sure that we're meeting the immediate needs."

In his book, McClellan says that after Katrina the White House "spent most of the first week in a state of denial."

What changed? McClellan says his views evolved during the writing process. Did he have a sudden attack of conscience over having been a fount of misleading information? Or did he conclude that a book defending his longtime political patron would not sell?

The book makes clear that McClellan felt badly burned after Karl Rove and Scooter Libby assured him they had no involvement in leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, leaving the spokesman to be pummeled by the press when that turned out to be untrue. "It was my reputation crumbling away, bit by bit," he writes. "The ridicule was dispiriting and humiliating. . . . All I could do was go into a defensive crouch and stonewall."

But McClellan's critique is undercut by former colleagues who insist he never aired any misgivings about Bush in private. "Scottie was the truest of the true believers," says former Bush press aide Adam Levine. "Even in the most difficult of times he never wavered or showed any signs of disagreement or doubt. So to see him do this now is beyond comprehension."

Although McClellan staunchly defended Bush's Iraq rationale, he now writes that the national press corps "was probably too deferential to the White House" and that "the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation" by exposing the flimsy rationale for war. This reignited a long-running argument about whether journalists fell down on the job.

Several news organizations, including the New York Times and Washington Post, have acknowledged that they should have been more aggressive in challenging the claims about Saddam Hussein harboring illegal weapons. Skeptical stories were underplayed and dissident voices largely marginalized.

CBS anchor Katie Couric, who was at NBC during the run-up to war, told "The Early Show" last week that this was "one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism. . . . There was a sense, a pressure from the corporations who own where we work, and from government itself to really squash any kind of dissent."

CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin, recalling her time at MSNBC, told viewers that "the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fervor in the nation. . . . The higher the president's ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president."

MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines calls Yellin a "disgruntled . . . news reader" who worked there for one year and had "little to no contact with editorial decision-makers." Yellin says she stands by her comments but did not mean to imply that corporate executives were directly giving her orders.

In the end, the journalists' turncoat-of-the-week turned on them as well. Both sides are trying to distance themselves from the administration's failures. Reporters admit they should have pushed back harder; McClellan joins Matthew Dowd, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill and others who have assailed their former boss.

But it is McClellan, previously regarded by the media as pleasant but ineffective, who is hawking a harsh book that few imagined he would write. Media outlets that once denigrated him may be giving him a platform, but the lasting image is of McClellan stammering at the White House podium, delivering what he now calls propaganda.

Furthermore . . .

Hillary Clinton carries Puerto Rico by a 2-1 margin, "a widely expected win that underscores the advantage she has enjoyed among Latino voters over Democratic rival Barack Obama," says the L.A. Times. But of course, the media have already moved on.

As I mentioned, National Review has mounted an anti-McClellan blitz. Here are brief excerpts, starting with Jonah Goldberg:

"This all bespeaks a level of sophistication few ever credited McClellan with when he stood at the podium looking like a McDonald's cashier flummoxed by an order. He's hawking books by making people think he's charging the Bush administration with wholesale dishonesty when he's not even making that case at the retail level."

Rich Lowry:

"Likable, but maladroit and plodding, he was the perfect spokesman for the administration of Harriet Miers, Michael Brown, and Al Gonzales . . . McClellan's book has all the inherent interest of one of his briefings."

Kathryn Jean Lopez:

"Scott McClellan does a lot of empty whining about 'the Washington game' in his book, and on his media tour thus far. Ironically, Scott McClellan is what's wrong with Washington: people in power who don't believe in anything."

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan is a bit more sympathetic:

"The book can be seen as a grenade lobbed over the wall. Thus the explosive response. He is a traitor, turncoat, betrayer, sellout. If he'd had any guts he would have spoken up when he was in power.

"I want to quote his defenders, but he doesn't have any.

"Those in the mainstream media who want to see the president unmasked, who want to see the administration revealed as something dark, do not want to be caught cheering on the unmasker.

"The left, while embracing the book's central assertions, will paint him as a weasel who belatedly 'fessed up. They're big on omertà on the left. It's part of how they survive.

"The right will--already has--pummel him for disloyalty. But those damning him today would have damned him even more if he'd resigned on principle three years ago. They--and the administration--would have beaten him to a pulp, the former from rage, the latter as a lesson: This is what happens when you leave and talk."

Meanwhile, after hanging in during the Jeremiah Wright furor, Barack Obama quit Trinity Church over the weekend. The precipitating event was that video of a guest pastor, Michael Pfleger, carrying on as if he were Hillary, lamenting that "I'm white" and "I'm entitled" and "a black man is stealing my show!" Have you noticed that wasn't much of a newspaper story? It was Fox News relentlessly playing the tape, followed by the other cable networks, and then the network newscasts, and the New York Times finally carrying a story Saturday.

Well, it was a story. If you're a presidential candidate, do you want to defend that rant? But the hour-after-hour repetition on cable made the situation untenable for Obama. (He also said that some journalists were harassing Trinity parishioners. I'd like to see if there's any evidence of that.)

As Chicago Tribune columnist Manya Brachear puts it, "Can a political figure join a house of worship without putting its spiritual leader or congregation under the microscope?"

In Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum examines former president Bill Clinton:

"To know Clinton is, sooner or later, to be exasperated by his indiscipline and disappointed by his shortcomings. But through it all, it has been easy enough to retain an enduring admiration--even affection--for a president whose sins against decorum and the dignity of his office seemed venial in contrast to the systemic indifference, incompetence, corruption, and constitutional predations of his successor's administration. That is, easy enough until now.

"This winter, as Clinton moved with seeming abandon to stain his wife's presidential campaign in the name of saving it, as disclosures about his dubious associates piled up, as his refusal to disclose the names of donors to his presidential library and foundation and his and his wife's reluctance to release their income-tax returns created crippling and completely avoidable distractions for Hillary Clinton's own long-suffering ambition, I found myself asking again and again, What's the matter with him?"

Oh, and there is no "proof of post-presidential sexual indiscretions on Clinton's part, despite a steady stream of tabloid speculation and Internet intimations that the Big Dog might be up to his old tricks."

Purdum adds this disclosure: "My wife, Dee Dee Myers, was [Bill] Clinton's first press secretary. They have not been in regular contact since she left the White House, and she has not been a source for this article."

Bill Clinton's office didn't much like the piece:

"A tawdry, anonymous quote-filled attack piece, published in this month's Vanity Fair magazine regarding former President Bill Clinton repeats many past attacks on him, ignores much prior positive coverage, includes numerous errors, and ultimately breaks no new ground. It is, in short, journalism of personal destruction at its worst . . .

"This piece was written by Todd Purdum, who is married to Dee Dee Myers, former White House Press Secretary. Purdum's disclosure of this in the piece does not, as Vanity Fair apparently concluded, remove the obvious conflict of interest. It's a conflict that would likely not be contemplated at more reputable publications."

Wait a second. Dee Dee worked for Bill Clinton. Wouldn't she be considered a sympathetic source?

The memo goes on to cite past libel suits against Vanity Fair and to criticize Editor Graydon Carter's Hollywood deals.

Is John McCain cynical enough to win the White House? The New Republic's Noam Scheiber says it can't help McCain to be constantly bringing up the war:

"My hunch is that McCain really wants to debate Iraq--he really, truly thinks it's the most important issue facing the country, and thinks he can persuade people on the merits--and so his political advisers are doing the best they can with it. I guess I respect that on some level. And, politically, it does reinforce his truth-teller, 'I'd rather lose an election than lose a war' image. But, assuming Obama is able to establish a minimum level of national security credibility, which I think he will, McCain may be making a strategic mistake."

In Time, Michael Kinsley examines whether Obama's ties to the Weather Underground bombers Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn is troubling:

"Ayers and Dohrn are despicable, and yet making an issue of Obama's relationship with them is absurd.

"In America we believe in redemption and even self-reinvention. And we don't usually require stagy Stalinesque recantations. But Dohrn and Ayers test the limits of that generosity. They remain spectacularly unrepentant, self-indulgent, unreflective--still bloated with a sense of entitlement, still smug with certainty . . .

"If Obama's relationship with Ayers, however tangential, exposes Obama as a radical himself, or at least as a man with terrible judgment, he shares that radicalism or terrible judgment with a comically respectable list of Chicagoans and others--including Republicans and conservatives--who have embraced Ayers and Dohrn as good company, good citizens, even experts on children's issues."

And in the great back story department, Keith Olbermann reveals what really happened when Rupert Murdoch fired him as a Fox sportscaster (it involves the L.A. Dodgers).

Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."