This can apply to White House Press Secretaries in general, but I am a bit ambivalent about McClellan. He doesn’t come across as particularly likeable or loathesome. Sometimes it’s been fun to watch him squirm as the press corps has seemed to either grow a pair or smelled blood in the water, depending on one’s POV. Is the Press Secretary culpable in the lies of the administration, or merely following orders?
Bonus debate point: Is the term “Press Secretary” an oxymoron, given the origins of the word?
Since the very definition of shill involves some form of deceit, it would be impossible to be an “innocent shill.” It would help if an administration actually hired a debater who not only believed in the policies of the administration but could effectively respond to counter-points and criticisms of those policies in the press.
Press secretaries have an important role in getting a lot of routine, trivial information (schedules, etc., fielding interview requests, getting background materials to media) out to the White House press corps. They’re also the designated point person for Today’s Message.
They don’t get to set policy – Hell, a lot of times they don’t even really know why the policy is what it is. About all they can hope for is that the message points they’re given to deliver aren’t flat out lies.
Every press secretary knows that when they take the job. I don’t think any of them actually believe it, though.
Why did he step down?
The NYT article today described McClellan’s leaving as part of “the overhaul of the White House”. So what does the White House (potentially) have to gain by his stepping down? How does it enable a positive change in the WH’s image?
(With the caveat that the “official” reason is often different from the latent one.)
We’ll just have to wait to see what he puts in his book. That should be appearing in 3 to 6 months, and I hope that there is a TDS appearance that goes along with it.
On the one hand, every administration at every level needs a smooth-talking type who can stand in front of journalists and TV cameras and calmly represent the position of said administration using statements and arguments that have already been advanced by other officials, or at least are consistent with same. Given the reality of politics, those statements and arguments will regularly amount to little more than obfuscations and half-truths, and will frequently nestle up against outright deception. If McClellan hadn’t been doing it, some other low-key used-car-salesman type would (and now one will). That’s true for every administration, not just this one; the extremity of this administration’s opacity, dishonesty and evasiveness is unique only for said extremity, not for the behaviors themselves.
On the other hand, I try to imagine myself in the same position, doing that job, and I honestly don’t know how McClellan meets his own eyes in the mirror every morning. I’m not capable of telling lies like that even for a cause I fully support, and I wouldn’t be able to continue participating in an enterprise if I were to discover that what I had previously offered as good-faith assertions had no basis in reality.
I’ll admit, I would be mildly curious to see a book come out of this, where McClellan either reveals himself, directly or indirectly, as a shameless transmitter of fraud in the name of a greater cause, or confesses his ignorance and apologizes for participation in and service to what is turning out to be a morally repugnant and probably criminal organization. I’d be mildly curious only, though, because either way McClellan is pretty much a tool, in every sense of the word.
I remember a Doonesbury cartoon from the Watergate days.
A reporter asks White House press secretary Ron Ziegler something like, “What is it like, to get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and ask yourself, ‘What lies must I peddle today? How many untruths and half-truths will I have to convey to the jackals in the press corps? How many crimes must I explain today, how many idiocies must I justify, how many knaves must I defend? When all is said and done, have I no sense of self-respect, no sense of shame, after all?’ And after all those thoughts go through your mind, Ron, staring at yourself in the mirror, what do you do?”
More reasonable to expect a book where he defends the Admin’s record and his own to the hilt, and insists everything he said as Press Secretary was the truth.
For the most part, I think of him as a guy who was just doing his job. He bears some responsibility for defending policies and people that I think were almost always lousy, but he didn’t create the policies. Without question, it’s a situation where if McClellan hadn’t done the job, someone else would have. It’s not like a different press secretary would have answered more questions, lied less or been more forthcoming. I would estimate that 90% of his job was to be a punching bag for the press, and he fulfilled that function. The next guy will do the same. If somebody put out a Bush administration deck of cards, McClellan is probably the two of clubs.
I also agree. I liked Ari Fleischer even less than I liked McClellan, but Fleischer had a spine. McClellan seemed hapless most of the time.
It’s a thankless job, but for the present leadership, it really doesn’t deserve any. I give Ari Fleischer at least a lot of credit for smarts and forsight getting the Hell out when he did. Fleischer was also quite a bit more articulate and polished than McClellan, IMO. Considering the steaming B.S. McClellan had to shovel on a nearly daily basis, the office of Press Secretary can’t be all that attractive these days to someone with both a mind and a conscience. I really thought McClellan was a bit of a stooge. Hard to know if another stooge will fill is shoes, or someone slicker.
In any administration, the Press Sec. is an awful job. The boss tells you to waffle, stonewall, or lie, and it’s your job to do that. The more dishonest the president is, the more you have to lie. Sometimes, watching McClellan was hilarious, and sometimes he was pitiable. They gave him preposterous, obviously false things to say, and he said them with a straight face. He was sent out to say things he would have to refute a few weeks later. He had to deny things everyone knew to be true.
The White House Press Corps knew they’d never get a straight answer from him, but it wasn’t any better talking to the Capo himself. If you ask him a question he doesn’t want to answer, he’ll dance you around and answer something else instead.
So, Bad Guy? No. Innocent Shill? No. He was an actor, playing the part of a liar. Everybody knew it, and only the most obedient news outlets showed him as sincere.
Scott wasn’t really very good at this, though. Ari (the only other press secretary I remember) would look the reporters in the eye, open his mouth and answer with a canned talking point that had no relavance to the question asked without sounding like he knew he was giving a crappy non-answer that everyone had heard a hundred times before. McClellan couldn’t sell the BS anywhere near as well, he looked toodefensive, you could tell by listening to him that he was BSing.
That doesn’t make Scott a bad person (indeed you could argue that it makes him a better one) but it did make him a bad press secretary.
Out of curiousity, how do previous press secretaries compare? I didn’t start paying that close attention before the Bush admin.
