Vanity Fair has done the impossible. They've made me feel, just a little bit, sorry for Scott McClellan. Their latest issue includes a profile of him, written by Michael Wolff, and it's brutal to the extent that you almost want to pity the guy. It's also incredibly revealing of a White House that's totally, insultingly out of touch and doesn't even know it.
More on the flip...
The article spares no punches, and it's a riot. But it does seem oddly sympathetic to a man that it sees as woefully in over his head.
It's this verbal haplessness that has made Scott McClellan--a pleasant, low-wattage, old-before-his-time young fellow, with, at 38, a wife, no children, and "two dogs and four cats"--the living symbol of this White House's profound and, perhaps, mortal problem with language and meaning. McClellan himself, as though having some terrible social disability, has, standing miserably in the press briefing room every day, become a kick-me archetype. He's Piggy in Lord of the Flies: a living victim, whose reason for being is, apparently, to shoulder public ridicule and pain (or, come to think of it, he's Squealer from Animal Farm). He's the person nobody would ever choose to be.
The article goes on like that for several pages. It's all good for a laugh at poor Scotty's expense, and I'm sure the blogs are going to have a field day with it. But what I found most interesting was the seeming unawareness that he and the press briefings had turned into one big joke. When asked about his feelings on being posted to hundreds of blogs and having his every word picked apart and ridiculed, McClellan is utterly clueless.
"You're talking on [the White House] Web site?" says McClellan, a little bewildered, when I ask him about the transmutation of the briefing process in the last few years, as well as the embarrassment of having his every grunt and pause and garbled sentence rendered in freely available, near-instantaneous transcriptions. "When did that start?" Mc--Clellan fuzzily asks Mike, the transcriber he insists upon having at our interview. "Do you have any idea?"
Wolff goes back and forth between thinking that McClellan's ignorance and inability is all part of some master plan, and thinking that the White House just has no idea how things are playing out. He finally settles on the latter
But, personally, I think the true answer is that the Bush people have no idea what they're doing here. Language exists for these guys only as a bullying tactic (if they say we're at war, then we're at war). They rule by repetition--that's their truncheon. Their whole theory, to the extent they theorize, is to keep it simple, stupid--in fact, to mock the people who make it complicated. The problem is that Scott McClellan isn't really a bully. He's rather a pantywaist. So something of a reversal has happened. The press is now the bully and Scott Mc-Clellan is recognizable to everyone as the kid who, unfairly and cruelly, to be sure, gets instant-ly set upon and pulled apart. Indeed, he reminds us all, disgustingly, of our own inarticulateness (which may not be the best way to get the sympathy vote).
It's a facet of the Bush Administration slide that I don't think gets enough play. Scott McClellan gets routinely mocked as a joke, but it's easy to forget all the damage that his idiocy has caused this administration. The press corps was completely cowed after 9/11, and they were willing to print basically anything that the White House fed them. But Scott McClellan couldn't even do that properly. He can't deliver a canned line or a talking point and sound like it's credible. He can't even sound like he knows what the words he is saying mean.
As much as Iraq, Katrina, Plame and everything else have woken up the White House Press Corps, I think it's been McClellan as well. Like the man in the White House, you can't listen to McClellan without feeling like your intelligence is being insulted. Sit there day after day, and at some point you're going to start getting pissed off. Give us Scott McClellans, and you're going to end up with David Gregorys. Give us Michael Browns and Michael Chertoffs, and you're going to end up with a Democratic Congress that finally feels like getting feisty. Give us Donald Rumsfeld, and you'll end up with Jack Murtha. Give us enough incompetents, and you're going to end up out of power, and you'll have no one to blame but yourselves.
Bush Administration; you're reaping what you've sown.