Former White House spokesperson Scott McClellan caused quite the stir with his tell-more-than-usual book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception about his years working for president Bush. In the book McClellan attacks his former White House bosses for using propaganda to mislead the American people about the war in Iraq, the Valerie Plame case and the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, and he blames the deferential media for allowing the White House to get away with it.
Now as a cynical reader you may be forgiven for not being quite as shocked and saddened by these tales of government propaganda and lies as McClellan himself says he was. After all, aren't lies, deception and obfuscation the essence of all government and wasn't McClellan as a spokesperson the central cog in the propaganda machine, a machine that led to a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives?
Nor will you be the only one who is skeptical of the sincerity of McClellan's story and motives. The other parties involved – the White House, the pundits, the other spokespersons, the Democrats, the journalists – will likewise not buy the story of McClellan as a naïve well-meaning public servant who gradually discovered that his bosses were not as well-meaning and public-spirited as he thought they were.
This story makes McClellan about as credible as the man who, with righteous indignation, quits a five-year stint at the local slaughterhouse because he found out that "They kill animals in there! Who knew?"
So since McClellan must have known what he was getting himself into when he started his job the most sensible explanation for his actions is that he is jumping the sinking ship that is the Bush administration, thereby trying to secure a political, intellectual or media future for himself as one of the "good guys."
Mythology
The problem for some of the other parties involved though is that they cannot confront McClellan with the absurdities of his "official" story and thereby expose his real intentions.
After all, they all have an interest in sustaining the myth of government as serving the people, not themselves. Sure, there are some rotten apples every now and then, mistakes get made and occasionally power gets to people's heads. But that's why we have the heroic media and whistleblowers who keep a watchful and ever-skeptical eye on the government's actions, "keeping them honest."
McClellan's "official" story of himself as a whistleblower who wrote the book in order to call attention to changes that need to be made to restore the dignity and honesty of government fits that myth rather well. Government sometimes goes off the rails, but well-meaning whistleblowers, together with the media and the public, can get it back on track. The only anomaly in this case concerns the role of the media who are criticized by McClellan for not having been vigilant enough in exposing the truth. More about the role of the media later.
With this in mind it is interesting to observe how the different parties chose to respond to the book and how they either used or were constrained by the official mythology of good government.
Of course the opponents of the Bush administration had the easiest job. They could eagerly accept McClellan's story and use the myth of good government to their own advantage. So they took McClellan to be a whistleblower whose revelations show that this administration, not the institution of government itself, was the problem: The Bush administration has changed the government from the venerable, public service–oriented institution that it was under the Democratic rule of the 1990s, into a corrupt, power-hungry propaganda machine. And it's time for change!
Of course they thereby conveniently ignored the lies, misery and deception of the Clinton-Gore administration. (Kosovo, Iraq sanctions and Waco, anyone?)
The same tactic was open to disgruntled Republicans and old-time political hacks. They could grumble about how much better government used to be, what a mess the Bush administration has created and how standards have lapsed in the past decades. If only Bush had listened to them rather than to Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and the neocons none of this would have ever happened.
The White House
The White House and its supporters had a much more difficult job in responding. The ideal tactic is to disprove McClellan's factual claims by presenting evidence to the contrary, thereby exposing McClellan as a liar. But that's a toughie since, you know, there is no such evidence.
If anything, the more the White House actually talks about the facts in the run up to the war, their handling of "Katrina" and the Valerie Plame case, the deeper the hole they'll be digging for themselves. So they'll talk about anything other than the actual subjects that McClellan raised.
They could for example attack McClellan's motives. But as we saw above this presents problems of its own. They cannot say that obviously McClellan was not sincere when he said that he became a whistleblower because he was shocked by the lies and deception he saw around him, that McClellan must have known what he was getting himself into by working as a government spokesperson, i.e. as a professional liar. The fact that this is actually most likely true does not help the White House here because as we saw this is not a truth that can be publicly expressed. It would blow up the myth of government as serving the public.
But personally attacking McClellan in other ways is equally risky for it could easily be seen as the big bad powerful administration attacking the heroic vulnerable whistleblower.
In the end, the White House and the Republican Party in general opted for a mix of the above. They did their best to steer the conversation away from the actual topic: the use of propaganda to mislead the American public into supporting a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars. And they did their best to make McClellan come across as a somewhat hapless and spineless character who was kept "out of the loop" and simply cannot know what he is talking about.
Moreover, they say, nobody in the White House denies that mistakes were made, but they were just that: honest mistakes, not deception or propaganda. And the president himself saw to it that measures were taken to prevent such mistakes from re-occurring.
Furthermore, White House staff say that the Scott McClellan who wrote the book is not the Scott they knew from his White House years, the Scott they worked with, liked, helped and trusted. They don't understand what the cause of Scott's sudden metamorphosis is, why he would turn against them. They're not angry, just puzzled.
This of course paved the way for others to volunteer guesses as to what explains McClellan's transformation. The White House itself had to sound reasonable and respectable in responding to McClellan's claims, but others such as right-wing radio and TV hosts and commentators as well as former politicians were less constrained. They could function as the bloodthirsty attack dogs going after the traitor.
Bob Dole probably came closest to expressing what the Bush loyalists really thought (and what likely is the truth) when he suggested in a private e-mail that McClellan is just a "miserable creature" who enjoys the proximity to power and who will rat on his bosses to obtain a fine position in the Democratic Party.
The funniest responses came from those Republicans who complained about how unprofessional McClellan's behavior was. They're right of course; given McClellan's job description few things could be less professional than actually exposing the deceit that you were supposed to cover up.
So all in all, the White House denied (though not refuted) McClellan's accusations of government lies and deception, claiming McClellan was not in a position to know either way, and then let their cronies do the dirty work of suggesting that McClellan just invented or parroted these accusations to exploit public resentment over a war gone bad to further his own career.
One thing is certain: nobody in any way related to the White House or the Republican Party will talk in any detail about McClellan's actual accusations, about the facts.
The media
But wait, in the mythology of good government, didn't we have the media to "keep them honest," to expose government mistakes? What about them, will they force the conversation to turn to that topic?
Not a chance. The truly remarkable thing about McClellan's book is that he attacks the media as well, for being too deferential and not inquisitive enough and so allowing the White House to get away with its propaganda. If the liberal media had lived up to its reputation, McClellan says, the country would have been much better off. Ouch. A former political spokesperson criticizing the media for making things too easy on him and his bosses.
So, like the White House itself, the media are angry but there is little they can do. As for example Bill Moyers showed in his documentary Buying the War: How Did the Mainstream Press Get It So Wrong?, McClellan is simply right about this: the media were deferential to the White House, afraid to ask tough questions, to do research that disproved the claims coming from the White House for fear of coming across as unpatriotic.
So how do the mainstream media respond to McClellan's book? Firstly they simply deny the claim and profess helplessness. They did ask McClellan tough questions at all those White House press conferences. But McClellan was always so evasive, so unwilling to tell the truth, so skilled at deflecting questions that this was simply hopeless. They tried their best, but the White House was just unwilling to answer them. What could they do?
Well, how about doing some research of their own, talking to people disputing the government's claims, writing stories that expose government lies and propaganda rather than just transcribing White House press conferences (as the Daily Show calls it) and going along for the ride? You know, being real journalists.
But of course there is a serious risk involved in doing that: by being critical of the White House they might lose access. They might for example not be allowed to the White House press conferences anymore. Now the reader might ask what good access to press conferences is if you don't thereby actually have access to any meaningful information to do your part as a journalist?
But this question is based on the mythology of journalism, not its actuality. The proper question is what good is it being a journalist if you no longer have the experience of feeling important, close to power, and have the president, the most powerful man in the world, call you by your first name, joking with you.
Moreover, the journalists say, we were under pressure from our executives to not do stories that were too critical of president Bush and the war in Iraq while his approval ratings were high. This of course is an astonishing admission for people who, in accordance with the mythology of journalism, pride themselves on being independent thinkers and who cherish their role as watchdogs of the government.
The problem is that they could in fact easily do the contemporary equivalent of such a story at any moment they want to. There are hundreds or thousands of stories out there that would expose government corruption, incompetence and cover-ups, from relatively small incidents to grand criminal schemes like "monetary policy" and the war on drugs. But every day they choose not to do such independent research or report and instead they just go with the flow.
Sure, they will make fiery resolutions to do better next time. A journalist in a panel discussion last week said that it was true that the media, including himself, had not been critical enough in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and that he had resolved to never let this happen again. But judging from the age of this journalist he was around during the first Gulf War and the Kosovo war as well, so who knows how many times he has made the very same resolve already.
The buzz of power
Journalists are like the drunkard who wakes up in the morning, after having made a fool of himself the night before, and swears to himself: "Never again." He is not serious in his desire to quit, and neither are journalists when they say that from now on they are going to be real journalists.
Just as the drunkard craves the buzz of alcohol, the journalists, as well as petty bureaucrats like Scott McClellan, crave the buzz of power. Only government can give them that buzz and so politicians, bureaucrats and journalists are engaged in a never-ending game, where the goal is not to win the game, but to play it, because the game constitutes power. Sometimes the politicians will have the upper hand, and other times the journalists. Balances will shift, some pawns will be sacrificed every now and then, but the game will not end if the players can help it.
The mythology of governments serving the public and of the press keeping the politicians honest is only intended to obfuscate and justify what is really going on, the buzz of power.
All the players in the Scott McClellan story, the White House, the pundits, the political opponents, the press and McClellan himself have to pay respect to the mythology if they are to serve their own selfish interests.
In this case, the Democrats and other political opponents were able to use the mythology and McClellan's book to argue against the Bush administration and for their own side: the Bush administration was incompetent and corrupt, but we will be different and keep government on the straight and narrow.
McClellan himself used the mythology to escape the sinking ship and position himself for a better political or media future. He portrayed himself as the whistleblower whose only concern is good government, knowing full well the oxymoronic nature of that term.
By doing so he made himself relatively invulnerable to fundamental criticism because the two parties that McClellan criticized most, the White House and the press, had their hands tied behind their backs by the same mythology. They could not use McClellan to further their own interests as Bush's opponents could, but they could not fully expose his hypocrisy either since that would entail admitting the true nature of government and journalism.
So they were prevented from saying what they really wanted to say: "Scott, you bastard! You're ruining our game!"
June 4, 2008
