What Happened?

I finally finished listening to Scott McClellan’s book, What Happened. Scott read the book – all fifteen hours of it – but is not one of the world’s best orators. Despite the halting reading, I found myself interested in what he had to say. Who wouldn’t? He was close to Bush and the Administration’s inner machinations, sort of.

The crux of the book is that Carl Rove and ‘Scooter’ Libby screwed his credibility by lying to him about the disclosure of Vallerie (sp?) Plame’s identity and letting him repeat those lies to the press. After this disaster, Scott started thinking about leaving the White House Staff. Josh Bolton, the Chief of Staff replacing Andrew Card, pushed Scott out before he had a chance to offer his own resignation at the three-year mark as Press Secretary.

I was surprised at how much Scott still defends Bush. You can hear the admiration for the man come through in his reading, even while he disagrees with the decisions that Bush made. The permanent Washington campaign led to the downfall of a President who pledged to change the culture of Washington, but instead polarized it even more.

I was shocked to hear Scott defend the errant 16 words on weapons of mass destruction. Scott believes the President and Condi Rice didn’t know how the words got in there. Huh? Has he not read Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies? There was a battle to keep those words out but Cheney wanted them in, and the President had to know about it.

I was also shocked to hear Scott tentatively assert that perhaps the marketing of a war was a bad idea. I’m glad he came to that very insightful conclusion that when you commit killing US soldiers as well as innocent civilians, and spending trillions of US dollars that a marketing campaign is not the way to sell the war.

I think I was most surprised by what appears to be McClellan’s naivete about the way things really work, despite his experiences working on political campaigns for most of his life. I am glad, though, he decided to vote against McCain and threw in his support for Barak Obama. It shows me that he recognizes the problems he was apart of and wants to be part of the solution to the mess he helped perpetuate.