McClellan’s Shocking Memoir

28 May 2008 |permalink | email article

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, in a memoir to be published on Monday, offers a stinging critique of President Bush as “veering terribly off course,” not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and taking a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Politico, by refusing to honor an embargo that a few reporters hold their stories until Sunday, got an exclusive by purchasing “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” at a Washington bookstore.

The explosive revelations by McClellan, one of the president’s earliest and most loyal Texas aides, are certain to reverberate in the fall campaign.

The book will be a major problem for presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. He initially supported the Iraq war, needs Bush’s fundraising base while attempting to distance himself from a failed administration.

For Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee who uniquely opposed the war and has tied McCain to Bush’s policies, the memoir is a huge political bonanza.

Some of McClellan’s charges:

* Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

* The White House press corps was too easy on his administration during the run-up to the war.

* Two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their stories straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them – and he was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence that they had not given him all the facts.

* Karl Rove and Scooter Libby “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

* Katrina was one of the worst disasters in U.S. history and became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency.

Some of the chapter titles are biting: “Deniability,” “Triumph and Illusion,” “Out of Touch,” and “Revelation and Humiliation.”

RealClearPolitics Average Approval Rating for Bush as the week began was 30.8%. How far will it fall before Nov. 4?

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