Everybody hates Scott McClellan:Everybody.
Right and
left. Everybody except me.
That's not to say he was blameless. But he seemed like a different kind of person when compared to, say, Ari Fleischer or Tony Snow - two people who were really irritating. McClellan was robot-like, but that seemed to be partly due to his being uncomfortable with what he was saying. And McClellan wasn't effective, which may be related to his failure to be a slick message-man. Take a look at this chart from
pollkatz. The yellow area is the period when McClellan was the spokesman for the administration (
Jul 03 - Apr 06):
From mid-50% approval to mid-30%. Pretty good going, huh?
That his book is critical of Bush comes as no surprise. Very approximately, McClellan was like Paul O'Neill, someone who not part of the "hard fighting" crowd (Cheney, Bartlett, Hughes, Rove).
Some people are saying that McClellan should have bugged out at the time, but it's difficult for people to do that while still deep inside the White House. Now that McClellan is away from the administration for two years, it's easier to speak out. And another thing. Instead of McClellan doing what he did as press secretary and writing a book, there could just as easily been another press secretary willing to push the Bush line and yet
not write frankly about things afterwards. McClellan at least helps expose the Bush administration's irresponsible rush to war.
Attacks on McClellan's character blunt his (generally) anti-war message. It may feel good, but it's not good politics.
posted by Quiddity at 5/28/2008 07:09:00 PM
Didn't the Bush Administration replace McClellan with a "Snow job"? And then the "Snow job" with a blond bombshell? Keeping in mind that Scotty replaced Ari Airhead, the graph explains the slippery slope for being George W's flak-person. Scotty is beaming the dull George W down to Earth.
I recall feeling at the time Ari Fleischer left that he was leaving a sinking ship and handing off the bag of s--t to McClellan. McClellan was trying to be loyal, and I think he really believed Rove and Co. were not lying to him about the Plame leak. I think his anger at being left out in the loop and then lied to is the motivating factor here.
I think McClellan always knew the Iraq War II was based upon manipulation and lies, but, like Communist Party members in the 1930s, always compartmentalized for the larger cause, and that cause for the Busheviks was the "liberation" of the Middle East.
And to take the Communist Party analogy further, I don't hate McClellan, either, for coming out from the shadows. Watching Fleischer on t.v. ripping McClellan is like watching Lillian Hellman rip a former Party member who left the Party before Khruschev blew the whistle in 1956.
