McClellan Dregs: This Explains Everything

How could a guy known by all his colleagues too be a pro-Bush, pro-war on terror stand-up guy suddenly turn into ... well ... a Scott McClellan? That question has mystified his former colleagues, as WaPo captures well today:

Trent Duffy, who worked as McClellan's deputy for more than two years, said of the avid University of Texas sports fan: 'Tomorrow maybe we're going to learn he's rooting for the Oklahoma Sooners.'

Finally, there's an answer, provided by McClellan himself in an interview with USA Today:

"I have a lot of respect and admiration for Sen. McCain," former White House press secretary Scott McClellan said in a telephone interview with USA TODAY's David Jackson this afternoon.

"I'm also intrigued by Sen. Obama," McClellan added.

Assuming "intrigued" means "considering voting for," then we know why McClellan sold out his former boss: He was either posing the whole time he was in the White House, or he's gone stark raving mad.

So, again, the other question: Why would anyone care what this guy has to say?

McClellan Dregs: Scotty's On The Soros Payroll

Scott McClellan is making his media rounds today, trying desperately to turn his one-day media spotlight stretch into two. And what a day it was -- over 1 million Google hits for "McClellan what happened" (that's the name of his book, in case you somehow missed it), and no fewer than 640 hits on Nexis. Super.

One of the more interesting hits was this, from NewsBusters:

Peter Osnos, who wrote Wednesday that he “worked very closely” with Scott McClellan on McClellan's new book published by PublicAffairs which Osnos founded, is a liberal whose publishing house is affiliated with the far-left The Nation magazine and the publisher of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. PublicAffairs has a roster of authors who are nearly all liberals and/or liberal-leaning mainstream media figures, including six books by far-left bank-roller George Soros. On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, Ari Fleischer related that “Scott told me that his editor did 'tweak,' in Scott's word, a lot of the writing, especially in the last few months.” In an “Eat the Press” blog entry Wednesday, Rachel Sklar asked Osnos: “Did you work directly on the book with McClellan? (Who was his editor?)” Osnos replied: “The editor was Lisa Kaufman and yes, I worked very closely with them.”

Osnos' Public Affairs publishing is part of The Perseus Group; Little Green Footballs adds that there are several companies with this curious coincidence: they have both "Soros" and "Perseus" in them, like Perseus-Soros Management LLC. (Perseus was the son of Zeus and was the lucky guy who got the task of killing Medusa, which he accomplished neatly.)

McClellan is either a smart guy who knows exactly who he's working with, which means he completely and knowingly sold out his boss and the war against Islamist terror, aligning with the hard-core lefties; or, he's an incredibly stupid guy who has no idea who he's working with and therefore can't be trusted in anything he deduces.

I'm afraid it's the former. And worse, I'm afraid he'll do OK with it all. The media blitz has no legs, but now he has signaled to academia and the media that he's safe to book. The protracted and lucrative campus tour will be starting shortly, and soon to follow will be his gig as a commentator on NBC.

A good attack on McClellan from White House counselor Dan Bartlett can be found here. I particularly like how it points out that during the run-up to the war McClellan was a schlep, the deputy press secretary for domestic affairs, without access to anything remotely "inside" regarding the planning for the Iraq war he now terms as "rushed."

But good as Bartlett's attack is, it will make no difference. McClellan has the Soros seal of approval now, so even though the media storm will not last through the week, his new career as a Bush-whacker will feather his nest ... but it won't salve his conscience. If he has one.

McClellan Proves The Need For The Odd Press Secretary Model

Scott McClellan, former presidential press secretary turned turncoat with the publication of his memoir, has quite a publicity storm around him this morning. Here are the links under the lead McClellan story this morning on memorandum:

The Swamp, Attackerman, Newshoggers.com, The Corner, MSNBC, Too Sense, Daily Kos, Political Machine, Discourse.net, Outside The Beltway, On Deadline, Redstate, Brilliant at Breakfast, Informed Comment, Hot Air, Don Surber, THE GUN TOTING LIBERAL™, Emptywheel, Washington Monthly, Pam's House Blend, Facing South, David Corn, The Raw Story, Jules Crittenden, I Am TRex, Crooks and Liars, Romenesko, The Moderate Voice, Donklephant, Oliver Willis, The Reaction, Political Byline, The Washington Note, First Draft, Liberal Values, KIKO'S HOUSE, Connecting.the.Dots, Alternate Brain, Salon, The Art of the Possible, RADAMISTO, Macsmind, Political Punch, Rising Hegemon and Taegan Goddard's …

You can certainly read them, but they boil down to this: Everyone on the left says McClellan vindicates everything they believe about President Bush, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby; everyone on the right says he's a cheap sell-out. That's not what I'm writing about, per se.

Rather, I'm writing about McClellan's job. Not his job performance, which Seth Liebsohn nails down pretty well at The Corner, but his job.

In many ways, it's like my job. I am often the public spokesperson on a project, but my job is different from McClellan's old gig in that I don't allow myself to be kept in the dark so that my comments can be limited and my deniability can be plausible. I believe the role of the communications consultant is to understand all the facts and work with the client team to determine how best to present them, both immediately and over time.

Of course, the job of White House Press Secretary also is not at all like my job. There's much more interest in his client; there are many, many more stories; the press is never avoidable, and most importantly, the stakes are exponentially higher. That's why the typical and tested White House model is to have a senior circle -- consider it too simply as President Bush and Rove -- and an junior circle that is briefed fully enough to communicate what the senior circle decides.

Would I take such a job, one that sets me up to periodically be a fog machine on the truth? I certainly wouldn't in the private sector, or for any government position short of a national security position like McClellan's. To take a press secretary job at the White House, CIA, State or Pentagon means that you understand your role as a distributor of designer information. And that means that after you leave, you don't write a book complaining that you may have misled the media. Of course you misled the media.

McClellan did more than attack Bush; he attacked the position of White House Press Secretary, making it unlikely the Press Secretary will ever be admitted into the Senior Circle, for good reason. And in the process, he underscored the unseemly character of his work.

One of the major blabs in McClellan's book has to do with the Plame Game, and the actions of Rove and Libby. Off limits. National security. McClellan can point to the legal battles and the Leftist lingo, but as a former White House official, he should see this matter is now tied up in the war debate, and since the administration is in office and the war is still going on, there is nothing at all that he should say about it.

His writing on Katrina has nothing to do with national security, but he still shouldn't be writing it because he accepted a job that entailed an understanding of his position not just while he was on the payroll, but after -- again, at least as long as the current administration is in office.

His is the worst kind of sell-out. We gather no new information from him because he is a junior level guy who (by smart design, it turns out) wasn't in the information loop at the senior levels. So we read his opinion about how the administration blundered in handling the war. McClellan has no meaningful perspective to offer there because he was on the tail end of the info-trian.

And we read that he thought the picture of Bush surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One was a bad idea, but he was overruled. Interesting and correct -- but if the price we have to pay for it is having him undercut the administration for 30 pieces of silver ... well, let's just say that McClellan illustrates the necessity of the senior tier/junior tier model.