One reason I haven't posted much recently is that I've been working on a long book list post, having spent much of my Detroit time trawling through bookstores. After Scott McClellan's book came out, I wrote up a little paragraph on it, but I might as well share it now:

Scott McClellan: What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong With Washington (2008, Public Affairs): Former Bush mouthpiece opens up a little wider than anyone expected. I've seen this described as "scathing" -- find that hard to believe, but it's hit a nerve, as shown by this 1-star Amazon reader review: "McClellan and Rumsfeld are the primary reasons why Bush's approval rating is as low as it is. They were awful communicators." So Bush's only problem is that he's misunderstood, undone by his own inept PR flacks. Strange thing is they were so highly regarded for so long.

The brouhaha this book has produced is amusing. With hardly an exception, the Republican establishment has circled wagons and counterattacked from their safest high ground: McClellan is a coward for not resigning earlier if this is what he felt, and in any case is not a team player for not waiting until the Bush administration is safely buried in the history books, Oh, and he's also a miserable money-grubbing miscreant. Bob Dole reportedly puts it this way:

There are miserable creatures like you in every administration who don't have the guts to speak up or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or colleagues. No, your type soaks up the benefits of power, revels in the limelight for years, then quits, and spurred on by greed, cashes in with a scathing critique . . .

No doubt you will "clean up" as the liberal anti-Bush press will promote your belated concerns with wild enthusiasm. When the money starts rolling in you should donate it to a worthy cause, something like, "Biting The Hand That Fed Me." [ . . . ] You're a hot ticket now but don't you, deep down, feel like a total ingrate?

Of all the stuff written about McClellan, by far the most interesting has been this item by Osha Gray Davidson, addressing the question of how much McClellan sold out for, and how much direction he got from his New York editor. The answer to both is at most not much and more likely very little. Davidson argues that PublicAffairs is notorious for their stingy advances -- McClellan's was "a five-figure advance" (i.e., between $10-100k; Karl Rove got $1.5 million from Simon & Schuster) -- and Davidson has written for the same editor McClellan had (Lisa Kaufman):

I'm not sure that McClellan knows this (he and I have never met or spoken), but PublicAffairs was at first skeptical when McClellan and his agent made their pitch. Doubtful enough that, says Kaufman, founder/publisher Peter Osnos called around first, asking White House reporters what they thought of McClellan. "They told Peter that Scott was a straight shooter," says Kaufman. "That if he says he's going to tell the truth, he will tell the truth."

Obviously, I can't vouch for McClellan's veracity. I have, however, had a chance to read his book. And having also known and worked with Kaufman for several years, I can say this: What Happened was not, as Rove et al. have charged, written by his "New York editor." Stylistically, that is just not her voice on the page. Neither is Kaufman some ideologue with an agenda to push. She demands that her authors write intelligently, clearly and honestly, regardless of their political views. The notion of Kaufman as "brainwasher" is absurd.

I'm still not all that interested in the book, mostly because the bounds of what McClellan knew then and knows now are so limited: much of what he has to say reduces down to "I misinformed the public because I was misinformed myself." That may mean a lot to him, but it's not like it wasn't clear to the rest of us even then, let alone now. Maybe the book has some useful details, and maybe some juicy quotes, but that's about as far as he can go. He did, after all, not just support but facilitate the war. Sure, he should have screamed bloody murder at the time, but it's hard to conceive of anyone who could (a) get the job as Bush's liar-in-chief in the first place, and (b) reject it publicly in real time. Ari Fleischer and Tony Snow are two examples of (a) who still haven't come close to wising up as much as McClellan.