Words Fail Him
Now that the daily White House briefings are instantly available online, Press Secretary Scott McClellan's mangled sentences, flat-footed evasions, and genial befuddlement have made him the butt of a thousand blogs, as well as of an increasingly savage press corps. Is he a victim, a pawn, or a P.R. disaster?

http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/060404fege01

(Gold9472: Isn't it amazing how long it took for a negative piece of news about Scott McClellan to come out? It must mean he's on the list for expendable people.)

By MICHAEL WOLFF
Contact him at michael@burnrate.com.

ow come the White House pressroom doesn't have PowerPoint? Nearly every conference and meeting and middle-school assembly supplies this visual speaking aid and basic technology to lackluster and tongue-tied speakers.

But when I mentioned PowerPoint and other marvels of communication to Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, in a recent interview, he got a cloudy look—as though I had been making an incongruous or impertinent suggestion. As though only a total outsider, or fool, or wise guy would apply such workaday logic to the briefing process.

The briefing room exists, frozen in amber, in another time. The moment is somewhere after Richard Nixon tried to accommodate—and control—the burgeoning press corps by converting F.D.R.'s pool house, sauna, rubdown rooms, and dog kennel into press offices and a small auditorium (it's still, basically, a pool house, with a door that flaps open directly onto the White House lawn, allowing in gusts of hot or cold air). And somewhere well before the advent of personal computers and the digital age (there is no Wi-Fi in the briefing room).

A kind of daily Socratic dialogue, or at least an attempt at one, continues to take place in the briefing room in a method of inquiry initiated by Joseph Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson's primary aide and, effectively, the nation's first press secretary: a ritual Q&A that leads to both what the White House wants you to know and away from what it doesn't want you to know. Only, now the dialogue is led by something of a knuckleheaded Socrates, each day struggling and failing to talk his way out of a paper bag.

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.

His daily march into hostile territo-ry, without any of the available diver-sions and protections that a basic presentation-software package might provide, is so fraught that it must be a cunning setup—diabolical Karl Rove at it again. If not, it's a remarkable, defining lack of self-awareness on the part of the heretofore all-controlling Bush administration.

McClellan himself hardly seems to be a control freak, nor does he seem all that interested in analyzing his place in a grand political design.

He's obviously comfortable as just a cog in the greater machine. After all, the briefing he presides over is, as much as anything, a ritual (you can more easily explain how it got to be here than why it continues to exist) and a sideshow. ("One thing that the live briefings did," McClellan says about the introduction of live broadcasts during the Clinton administration, "was attract a lot of colorful characters," by which he means, without particular rancor, flaky people and media hounds.) In this and in other recent ad-ministrations, the high-end White House media and communication functions have been moved out of the traditional press office into a larger political sphere (Karl Rove is the real press secretary—or media general). What's more, the Bush administration has taken a further step to downgrade the operation: it's practically Bush policy to see the press corps as irrelevant and out of step with the American people.

The diminished role and stature of the place can't be missed: the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room is gross—there's the smell of disinfectant or long-lingering chlorine, broken seats, grungy carpets, harsh lighting, buckled acoustic tiling, shabby draperies ("Somebody fix the curtain—stage right, a white spot," an exasperated cameraman kept yelling, at nobody in particular, on one of the recent days when I was in the room).

But here's the thing that seems to have caught many people in and out of the administration quite unawares: outside of any plan or design or strategy (countermanding the plan, really), the briefing has slipped its bonds, defied its relegation, and become the true public face of the White House.

This supposed side-show works now as something like the White House's daily discourse with the nation (if not for the nation as a whole, at least for the ideologically polarized Internet nation) and the world. It's the White House reality series. Or the briefing is our stumblebum version of challenging the P.M. on the House of Commons floor (we get the vitriol without the grandiloquence and good cheer).

Beginning with the advent of the live broadcasts, under Clinton's last press secretary, Mike McCurry, then as a staple of the cable news cycle, and now as endlessly repeated, ever available streaming video, the briefing has become the living, inarticulate, comically absurd voice of the White House. Under Mc-Clellan the briefing is not only the source of news but news itself: McClellan's performance, its degree of ham-handedness, echoed and refracted in a thousand blogs, is a central political event.

"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?"

Anyway, Scott McClellan, ready for prime time or not, may be the first real-time political figure and, arguably, the most public, or most exposed, man in America, gamely, doggedly repeating his set phrases ("We're going to keep focusing on the pressing priorities of the American people"; "We're going to continue to focus on the priorities of the American people"; "We're moving on to the priorities of the American people") long after they've become punch lines.

Putting someone as strikingly out of his depth as McClellan into this job (and keeping him there) could well be part of this administration's contempt for the press. But while that contempt is surely real, installing McClellan here may actually, in another self-awareness gap, have been the administration's idea of a generous act.

In the modern history of presidential press secretaries—from, say, Ron Ziegler in the Watergate White House through to the present—the job has veered between greater and lesser levels of stonewalling and accommodation. McClellan's immediate predecessor, Ari Fleischer, by nature a cold fish—and a prickly one at that—was quite a gifted stonewaller (true stonewalling involves a certain amount of aggression—an implicit threat that you will really be messed with if you go for the follow-up question). Then, too, his general air of resistance and tight-lippedness may have reflected not just the Bush administration's media hostility but Fleischer's own distance from the inner circle (he was an outsider, an Elizabeth Dole–campaign man). He didn't try to explain, perhaps because he couldn't.

McClellan, on the other hand, sincere and earnest, might reasonably have been regarded as a kinder, gentler, and, as it happens, more informed representative. He's an insider—a guy in the Texas circle. To that degree, the inner circle might have thought of him as a certain sort of gift to the press—the real Bush thing.

Indeed, it's a Texas political-family thing. His mother, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, became the mayor of Austin when Scott was in the third grade. By high school he was fully involved with her campaigns; by college he was running them. His older brother Mark McClellan heads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; before that, he was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Their parents are divorced: father Barr McClellan is the author of a book claiming that L.B.J. murdered President Kennedy; last year, Strayhorn announced that she was quitting the Texas G.O.P. to run against Rick Perry, the Republican governor (formerly Bush's lieutenant gov-ernor), as an independent. This hint of family eccentricity perhaps helped create McClellan's clear aversion to conflict and foster his air of let's-all-get-alongness (while that's his obvious inclination in the briefing room, he seems to have no real talent for getting people to get along with one another).

It was Karen Hughes, Bush's longtime aide and handler, who picked Mc-Clellan from the Texas Republican political crowd and brought him into then Governor Bush's political operation. McClellan is in the Hughes mold, haimish in a Texas sort of way, setting him innately apart from non-Texans. The Bush inner circle is also the us-versus-them circle.

He's what the Bush people like to call a straight shooter. Very much the kind of young person whom older people like (this is a certain sort of high status in politics in general and in southern politics in particular—dweeb as acolyte). The premium is on one-dimensionality. A singularity of purpose. No edge. No shading. No artifice—or the artifice is strictly Dale Car-ne-gie artifice. No slyness. No real sense of humor. No over-analyzing anything (one of McClellan's favorite criticisms of the press, and another of his often repeated phrases, is about the "tendency to over-interpret"). What you see is what you get.

In some perhaps crucial sense, he was, when he got the press-secretary job, in 2003, at the age of 35, not only the official representative of what the Bush people stood for but a proud example of it.

My guess is that nobody in the inner circle thought it very important that he couldn't talk, that he had to plod and often struggle through every sentence. Not being able to talk—not being quick enough and facile enough to shape language to your precise and urgent needs—might even have been a further sign of his straight-shooter qualities.

In that sense, McClellan may have been even an idealization. Just the facts, ma'am. That's all the press would get out of him—that's all anybody could get out of him. (He tends to relentlessly repeat anything that he thinks is a fact, for instance his initially quaint and then puzzling constant characterization of 50-year-old Supreme Court nominee John Roberts as "young," causing one reporter to press, "Are you aware of something that is getting ready to come out … that will make this administration say, `Well, that was when he was young and he has now changed his mind'?") Maybe the media wouldn't be able to twist his words, because his words would be, knowing Scott, necessarily so limited and basic.

End Part I