Word: mcclellan
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...There were plenty of surprise to go around this week, much of it coming from the publication of a book. It was hard to keep up with all the different ways people claimed to be taken aback by the contents of former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's memoir, What Happened. Some were surprised that the White House had lied about the war.(On what planet had they been living?) Others, like Bob Dole, could not imagine that a Bush staffer had written such a revelatory book. (Did they think the vaunted Bush message discipline and loyalty would last...
...main impact of the McClellan book probably won't be about Bush or loyalty or even, really, the war (and certainly not a congressional investigation, despite the threat by at least one Democrat on the Hill to call McClellan to testify). It's more likely to be about the political mood, which is genuinely rotten for incumbents and Republicans in particular...
...McClellan's book is another beta boost for the misery index. His memoir will feed the deep anxiety that the country has veered severely off the right track, that Washington is a cesspool of deception and hogwash, and that the federal government can't be trusted to do much of anything right. At a minimum, McClellan has not made it any easier for Republicans to maintain the balance of power in Washington. But the flap over his book is yet another reminder of how difficult the country will be to govern for whichever party wins in November...
...McClellan writes his share about White House personalities such as Dick Cheney ("the magic man") and Condoleezza Rice ("I was struck by how deft she is at protecting her reputation"). But the bulk of analysis is aimed at the top dog. "President Bush has always been an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader," he notes. "He chooses based...
...telling that the Secret Service code name for the press secretary was "Matrix." As McClellan notes, a large part of his job was - much like the villains in the Keanu Reeves film - to project the reality the White House wished the world to see, regardless of whether it actually existed...