Scotty's Legacy

Big ups to an anonymous PatRoW loyalist, fantasy baseball doormat and future Goodwill colleague (no jinx intended) for forwarding this story. It is quite reassuring to know that someone can succeed in the executive branch of American government because of – not in spite of – his inadequacies.

The entire piece is brilliant, but here are the basics:

McClellan's specialty was noncommunication; what's remarkable about him as a choice for press secretary is that he had no special talent for *explaining* Bush's policies to the world. In fact, he usually made things less clear by talking about them. Why use a bad explainer and a rotten communicator as your spokesman before the entire world?

… if the goal is to skate through unquestioned -- because the gaps in your explanations are so large to start with -- then to refuse to explain is a demonstration of raw presidential power. (As in "never apologize, never explain.") … Not to be persuasive, but to refute the assumption that there was anyone the White House needed or wanted to persuade… The very notion of persuasion conceded more to democratic politics than the Bush forces wanted to concede.

The same goes for spin. Anyone who talks about McClellan "spinning" the press has got the wrong idea. The premise of spin is that by artful restatement the facts can be made to look better for the president. But McClellan's speaking style is artless in the extreme. He's terrible at spin…spinning is improvisational. It requires you to think on your feet. McClellan was terrible at that too: wooden and unconvincing. He was not a phrase-maker, and he had no natural eloquence...Under pressure McClellan got more excruciatingly thick-headed and often belligerent, provoking belligerence back.

In what sense are these qualifications for the job of press secretary? Well, McClellan was there to make executive power more illegible, which is the way Bush, Dick Cheney (especially Cheney) and Karl Rove want it. Being inarticulate in public is basic to that goal.

Michael Wolff, in an effective profile of McClellan for Vanity Fair, noticed this. "Because Scott couldn't talk, he wouldn't be able to say anything for himself," Wolff writes. "His lack of verbal acumen, his lack of dexterity with a subordinate clause, becomes another part of the way to control the White House message in a White House obsessed with such control."

Let's see…no special talent, an artless speaking style, no natural eloquence, thick-headed and belligerent, AND a lack of verbal acumen? Holy shit, Karl Rove just got a hard-on thinking about his next puppet presidential candidate!