[Mb-civic] Scotty, the Joke Was on You - Ana Marie Cox - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Scotty, the Joke Was on You
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By Ana Marie Cox
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 23, 2006; B02

I 've always had a soft spot for departing White House press secretary 
Scott McClellan. Watching him give his choked-up goodbye on the White 
House lawn last week, I realized why. The jowls he's grown, the hair 
he's lost and the dark circles that have grown under his eyes in two 
years and nine months on the job have made him resemble Washington's 
other helpless diplomatic pawn: Scott McClellan is the baby panda of the 
press corps.

No wonder I couldn't stand to see him get beaten up.

McClellan is a metaphor magnet, actually. And they're rarely 
complimentary: He's been called a punching bag, a rock 'em sock 'em 
robot, a cog in the greater machine, Piggy from "Lord of the Flies." 
Even conservatives tend to use a tone in talking about him that's 
usually reserved for homely pets that can't seem to get adopted: the 
adjective "capable" turns up a lot. (McClellan and his wife have four 
cats and two dogs, a poignant piece of trivia for those of us who think 
of Scott as an abused puppy.)

In modern administrations, the press secretary is often compared to an 
obstacle of some sort. McClellan's prickly predecessor, Ari Fleischer, 
was a smirking wall -- mean, arrogant, indifferent. McClellan was no 
more forthcoming, but he lacked Fleischer's swaggering, 
eat-you-for-breakfast podium style. His verbal tussles with reporters 
have never seemed like a fair fight. They'd run over him with facts and 
quotes, and his tired, puffy face would take the impression for an 
instant, before popping back into place, reinflated by the expulsion of 
talking points. When reporters fought with Ari, it was unstoppable force 
meeting immovable object; when they charged at Scotty, they were running 
over a human traffic cone.

This is a White House that, for the most part, deals with errors, 
misstatements and blatant untruths by simply refusing to acknowledge 
their existence. What "Mission Accomplished" banner? Which Social 
Security reform? Harriet who?

Such unselfconscious dissembling at the top of the administration makes 
it difficult to believe that McClellan delivered Karl Rove's and Scooter 
Libby's infamous denials of their involvement in leaking the name of CIA 
agent Valerie Plame completely without deceit. Surely he was in on the joke.

And yet -- well, go to the video. In the contentious briefings that 
followed every scandalous revelation about the administration's attempts 
to undermine the antiwar criticisms of Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, 
McClellan almost physically crumbles. His eyes grow dim, his shoulders 
slump. He becomes twitchy and marble-mouthed, stammering through his 
stock phrases -- he professed inability to comment on special prosecutor 
Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation more than 200 times in the last 
year and a half -- and, occasionally, perspiring visibly. In the game of 
dodgeball between the press corps and the president's men, McClellan was 
always getting beaned between the eyes.

Perhaps that's why he was so easy to like, or at least pity; Rove and 
Libby didn't even do him the honor of having him do their dirty work. He 
didn't know what he was doing. In a White House full of jocks, McClellan 
had the air of the last kid to get picked for the team. One suspects he 
didn't really want to play the game anyway; he'd rather be at home, 
rehearsing the Darth Vader-Luke Skywalker lightsaber duel -- perhaps 
pantomiming with his brother Mark, head of Medicare and Medicaid, who is 
reportedly a science fiction geek.

At the height of his fumbling through the Fitzgerald investigation, the 
pathos of the press secretary drew the attention of professional flacks 
at PR Week, whose well-meaning advice was touchingly obvious: When 
reporters "come up to him after a press briefing, pat him on the back, 
and say, 'Hey Scott,' they do that because they still need him. He 
should not mistake that for respect."

You know what else McClellan probably shouldn't have mistaken for 
respect? Rove's lying to him. Because McClellan's awkward parrying also 
served a purpose: The White House could not have shown its disdain for 
the press corps more clearly if it hadn't bothered to hire a press 
secretary at all.

McClellan's increasingly hapless briefings made for good blog fodder and 
excellent "Daily Show" segments, and critics of the administration 
posted snippets of his flailing with unrestrained glee. But for me, it 
stopped being funny when McClellan -- in an act of clear desperation -- 
began to fall back on the one commodity he had: His own sweet 
guilelessness. Badgered over and over about his representation of Rove's 
and Libby's denials, McClellan beseeched the press: "I think you all in 
this room know me very well. And you know the type of person that I am."

Yes, Scott, we do. You're not the type to lie. You're just like us: the 
type who gets lied to.

Ana Marie Cox is the author of the Washington novel "Dog Days" 
(Riverhead) and an essayist for Time magazine.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101759.html?nav=hcmodule
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