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Saturday 22 November 2008

Et tu, Scott? Bush’s press aide turns on his boss

James Forsyth talks to Scott McClellan, former press secretary to the President, about his new book attacking the Bush administration, its methods and its deceits

For McClellan, what happened was that the Bush administration became corrupted by ‘Washington’. McClellan dots his speech with negative references to Washington, bemoaning that ‘you get to Washington and a lot of good people on both sides get caught up in the whole Washington game’. But there is a chronological problem with this argument: the most vicious politicking the Bush team engaged in occurred before it arrived in Washington. During the South Carolina primary in 2000 rumours were spread that John McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually the product of a liaison between McCain and a black prostitute, and there were whispers that McCain, far from being a brave POW, was actually some kind of Manchurian candidate. It would have made even the most hardened political operative queasy. It makes everyone’s conduct during the Plame affair appear innocuous. McClellan, though, draws a rather Jesuitical distinction: ‘I’ve no illusions about how hard-knuckle, bare-knuckle politics can be in the campaign but my concern is when that transfers over into the governance.’

Perhaps the strangest thing about McClellan is how much he sounds like an ordinary disgruntled voter rather than a former senior member of the President’s staff. On Iraq, he says that he ‘was concerned that we were moving very quickly into this war, a lot of Americans were; but, at the same time, like a lot of those Americans I was willing to give the President and his foreign policy team the benefit of the doubt.’ McClellan’s explanation for all this is that ‘you are so inside that bubble it is hard to step back and look at the larger perspective on things, so I wasn’t seeing clearly the larger perspective of it all’. Even so, it’s just plain odd that he didn’t ask more questions from the inside or even talk with his colleagues about what the administration was doing.

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