Scott McClellan, that smug, condescending A-hole Ari Fleisher… heck, remember Marlin Fitzwater?! I need to know why one of the most high-profile PR positions in the country invariably goes to a guy or gal I wouldn’t want speaking on behalf of my bunions.
Democratic press secretaries that come to mind don’t leave nearly as bad an aftertaste (big surprise), but I would hardly have called Dee Dee Myers or Mike McCurry enviable media ambassadors. Wouldn’t a given administration want the most qualified representative imaginable, someone who could both engage and deflect reporters with equal parts pleasantness and aplomb? To me, it always seems to be the whiny, humorless guy who gets stuck with the job after falling asleep at a meeting or something.
I realize this might belong in the Pit, but I’m geuinely interested in how these piss-poor spokespeople keep finding this job from one administration to the next.
Hey, you’re leaving out the best examples, Ron Ziegler and Ron Nessen.
On the other hand, Pierre Salinger and Bill Moyers held the job in the 1960s.
My WAG is that it’s an inevitable result of putting someone in a job in which he or she is required to respond to questions without actually answering them. How could anyone look good doing that? Really the whole notion of a White House spokesman is grounded in intellectual dishonesty. Why should there be such a job in the first place? There’s no credible reason why actual executives (such as the president) or actual policymakers (such as his cabinet) should not have to answer for themselves. Sticking in a middleman who neither holds executive authority nor formulates policy is a recipe for disaster.
I’m sorry, the whole “what do you expect?” line of thinking is too knee-jerkly cynical for me. There’s an exceedingly broad, almost hackneyed portrait of any politician as that of a lying, slippery coward who would condemn his own mother to the flesh trade if it got him an election. Present administration aside, it’s too simple an answer. Presidents don’t lie all the time; they couldn’t. It’d be logistically impossible. So why is it outrageous to expect a press secretary with bona fide likability and/or PR acumen?
Either too young or too ignorant to know the two names you mentioned, acsenray. And I thought I’d be wowing the crowds with M. Fitzwater. :B
Ron Ziegler was Nixon’s spokesman and he had to respond to all those questions during Watergate.
Ron Nessen was Ford’s spokesman.
I was too young to experience their press conferences live, but I’ve read transcripts and some of them were doozies.
Pierre Salinger was, I think, a Kennedy spokesman – he went on to become a respected journalist and commentator. I think he still does some commentary for A.B.C.
Bill Moyers was Johnson’s spokesman, and he has become one of the most intelligent, credible, respected, etc., journalists in America. He might be America’s only true journalist. He currently has a weekly show (“Now,” I think it’s called) on public television. Moyers tells a story about his days in the Johnson White House. I’m sure I’ll get the details wrong, but it goes like this – One day he was sitting at his desk, reading the newspaper and laughing to himself. It so happened that just at that time, L.B.J., was walking by and he asked Moyers what was so funny. Moyers said he was reading the latest Oliphant (or Herblock or something) cartoon. L.B.J.: “So you think he’s funny?” Moyers (with a straight face): “No, sir!”
I hear you, man. But I think there is a difference between this and acting as if it’s natural that all elected officials are corrupt weasels. I think it really is a function of the job of the spokesman. At a fundamental level, it demands dishonesty, and that is a result, I think, of the inherent intellectual dishonesty of having one person answer for someone else.
I definitely see your point, acsenray. By the way, I was typing sloppily before; what I meant was the two names you mentioned that I’m unfamiliar with. :B Bill Moyers is fantastic, I agree. And Salinger I first heard about back when that airliner crashed over Long Island- he was an early conspiracy theorist, claiming it was shot down, as I recall. Still, I understand he’s fairly well-repected.
Of course press secretaries don’t lie all the time. But they do have to put the best spin on events, even if the stories are negative. And the Press Corps is sitting there, hoping to catch them in a lie, hoping to catch them unprepared, and hoping to catch them screw up. So the Press Secretary is always trying to say:
“Don’t report this bad news. It’s not important. Here, report on this happy fluff piece that says how great we are”
and the press is always responding, “No, tell us about the bad news…it’s how we win Pulitzers!”
So, you have a naturally antagonistic relationship between the Press Corps and the Press Secretary over which side should have control over the reporting of the news, and the Press Corps have a natural advantage here, because they’re the ones who write the articles. There’s a fine line there. If the Press Secretary is too antagonistic to the press, they’ll start trying to make him look bad and never believe him. However, if he’s too friendly, they’ll walk all over him and have no reason to listen to him.
Also, remember, the only time everyone sees the Press Secretary, it is answering reporter’s questions. So, you’re seing him or her in battle mode, so he’s bound to look kind of put upon and hostile.
Another thing to remember is that the press secretary (or any PR-type, for that matter) only has X amount of information to give about the subject. Either he/she wasn’t in the room when the decision was made, or he/she knows how far to go before getting in trouble.
Let’s say a reporter asks a question and the press secretary gives out information W (the safe part.) A follow-up question gets information X (the part you save for the follow-up). Another follow-up question is going to get the weasel-eyed dance that refers back to W and X. And that’s when the fighting starts.
It depends what you mean by “press secretary”. One of Lincoln’s secretaries, John Nicolay, was a newspaper editor in Illinois, and he would occasionally drop stories to reporters that the White House wanted to see in the news.
George Cortelyou, one of McKinley’s and Roosevelt’s secretaries, is sometimes called “the first press secretary”. He didn’t do it full time, but he did get reporters work space in the White House, briefed reporters, gave them advance copies of speeches, and brought news articles to the President’s attention. One of Wilson’s secretaries did something similar.
The first president to have a full time press secretary was Hoover, whose press secretaries were first George Akerson, and then Theodore Joslin.
Disagree – the unending stream of unproven (and ultimately baseless) allegations against the Clinton White House struck me as proof that they couldn’t get the press to be sympathetic to their POV.
Then again, the entire “Travelgate” incident could have been a cause of it, since that largely involved the White House stopping the practice of giving freebies to the White House Press Corps., something they couldn’t have been thrilled about.
