In today's NYT, Frank Rich engages a topic that has been on my mind a lot recently: why the tiny, seemingly inconsequential pebble of Scott McClellan's new book should be creating such a huge ripple effect. After all, there is nothing new in this book, and it in fact is a far kinder rendering of Bush and especially McClellan than seems truthful or warranted.
What is the cause of the uproar that has kept McClellan in the news? Rich concludes, basically, that it's the war, stupid--that Americans are unhappily fixated on not only the failure of the Iraq War, but particularly on its duplicitous beginnings, and therefore any new telling of that story captures our attention.
To my thinking, Rich's analysis is incomplete.
In Rich's words:
So why the fuss? Mr. McClellan isn’t a sizzling TV personality, or, before now, a household name beyond the Beltway. His book secured no major prepublication media send-off on "60 Minutes" or a newsmagazine cover. But if the tale of how the White House ginned up the war is an old story, the big new news is how ferocious a hold this familiar tale still exerts on the public all these years later. We have not moved on.
Americans don’t like being lied to by their leaders, especially if there are casualties involved and especially if there’s no accountability. We view it as a crime story, and we won’t be satisfied until there’s a resolution.
As any rhetorician knows, causal arguments are the hardest ones to make. In a world of infinite possible correlations, nailing the one or multiple causes of an issue--or the effects of the same--is a slippery prospect. Yes, McClellan's topic is America's topic, but I would argue that the McClellan effect that we're seeing involves far more than the Iraq War.
I agree with Rich that Americans are increasingly fixated on how we got led into war. I was in the vocal and not small minority of folks who protested this war from the first time it entered political discussion. While this minority's valid protests have yet to be fully acknowledged and respected, more and more Americans have realized the tragic error the Iraq War is, and it is no wonder that these people, once led astray, are now asking Why and How, and thus books like McClellan's are a source of answers.
But let's look at McClellan a little more closely. I argue that he has shifted focus from himself and his own involvement in the debacle of the Iraq War to the Bush White House. The Left has no interest in shifting the focus back to McClellan for very obvious reasons--watching the White House roaches scramble from the light of McClellan's book is simply too much fun and too useful. McClellan, after all, is a small fish, especially in an election year.
So what makes McClellan so compelling? Think about how he has shaped this narrative: there he was, Bush loyalist, doing his best for the home team. He does not initially suspect that there can be anything malign or inaccurate about the information he is told to regurgitate to the press. But then he starts thinking, and gets a funny feeling about all the truthfulness of this information. He goes to Karl Rove and Scooter Libby for reassurance about Valerie Plame's identity and other aspects of the Iraq War. He is reassured that Rove and Libby are not lying. He continues to peddle the misinformation, twigging more and more to how untruthful it is, until he finally quits.
In other words, Beaver Cleaver goes to Washington to do Good Work for the American people. He is bright, young, clean-cut. He eagerly peddles what he is told is the truth, but when he starts to question it, he goes to Dad, seeking affirmation that what he is being told is really real. Dad pats him on the shoulder and sends him back out into the fray. Beaver is reassured for a time, but his youthful naivete is finally tarnished to an older and wiser cynicism, and so he quits.
Can you not see how ridiculous that is? Scott McClellan comes from a political family--I live in Austin, and I cross Dean Keeton street on a regular basis. That was his grandfather, dean of UT's law school. His mom, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, has had a colorful political career here in Texas. She has made some dubious decisions in that career, but that's beside the point: there is simply no way that McClellan in any way was naive like Beaver Cleaver, especially about George W. Bush and his advisors! Most obviously, Mom was a critic and then a Democrat during the critical time period.
McClellan's carefully crafted ethos as Beaver, I would argue, is what has resonated across the political spectrum. His experience, as he presents it, mimics the experience of many Americans: first a believer, then concerned, and finally a skeptic. It is not his fault, he implies, much as it is not these Americans' fault that they initially supported this horrible war.
While these Americans can be excused, McClellan cannot. It defies ration that he is as lily-pure as he purports to be, and in the end his hands are as bloody as the rest of the White House minions. I would be kinder IF McClellan had not so carefully located the problem away from those still in the White House. There are harder truths that McClellan could tell, and I find myself agreeing in part with Bob Dole (!!) about McClellan's spineless hypocrisy. Dole, of course, is also a hypocrite--but it takes one to know one. McClellan is indeed a "miserable creature."