The White House Two-Step

This is one of those great moments when I don’t even need to try to draw conclusions out of something that has happened. The White House afternoon press briefing from Monday, July 11 has just done it all for me.

Those with a keen eye towards the adventures of Scott McClellan, White House Press Secretary, will note the somewhat trying time he had of it this week but, as the song says, “I don’t like Mondays.” The White House Press corps, apparently waking up after someone put roofies in their coffee for the past four years, decided that maybe it was time to take McClellan out for a little test drive to see what he was made of. Now, some critics may argue that perhaps they should have thought to do this two years ago when he was made Press Secretary after Ari Fleischer resigned, but to you I say that while I agree with you in principle, remember the adage about being late versus being never.

It gives one pause to think why would the press corps start asking these questions now? The obvious answer is that Someone has decided that this is newsworthy suddenly, although its strange because no one ever seems to know who this Someone is. I personally think that it probably has much more to do with journalists feeling a very real threat to their jobs and the manner in which they can earn their livelihood, and while that might seem callous or self-centered, again I ask you to remember the late/never dichotomy in addition to the reminder of what happens when a fire gets lit in the close proximity of someone’s behind: you tend to jump.

For those who haven’t had a chance to see a press corps actually doing its job, check out the transcript of the briefing here.

After reading it, you will no doubt notice how often McClellan is asked to comment on Karl Rove and the recent revelations that he may have had something to do with the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. By my count, he was asked 32 times. Total number of times responding without saying something to the effect of “no comment”: 0. I should also mention that the level to which he refused to answer even extended to questions asking if the president even met with Rove today (as one would assume he would, given that Rove is the deputy chief-of-staff and thus responsible for much in the way of day-to-day White House activities) or what official role Rove plays in the White House, and answer that could technically be gleaned by consulting www.whitehouse.gov. This says a little bit about McClellan’s refusal to even acknowledge that Rove is around. He is, however, perfectly willing to give a 226-word recitation on the virtues of freedom and the value of staying the course of Our Heroic Battle in light of the London bombings last week as well as a 199-word follow-up several minutes later.

I have to say right here that I love London. It is my favorite city on this planet. Having spent a good deal of time there, I know each of the places where the four bombs went off well and could recognize streets and stores when looking at the images of the aftermath. I have always been amazed at the qualities of Londoners, especially in respect to how they deal with hardship. We’re talking about a city that has regular threats to its underground system and yet still runs the trains. The city was leveled during the Blitz in World War Two and rather than run and hide the King and Queen actually elected to stay in the partially ruined city to show their people that they were with them. The city has literally burned to the ground several times, to say nothing of having its population utterly laid waste by plagues and diseases. And yet the city and its people are still thriving. America, for all its own unique history, is essentially an off-shoot of London and its people. And what do we do when our older sibling experiences an attack? We turn it into a message about how we, Americans, are being threatened.

This, along with McClellan’s refusal to talk about something he already talked about which turns out to be HUGELY germane to the country’s national security, is a classic Bush Administration White House Two-Step. Deflect the issue, use saccharine melodrama to hoodwink people into thinking that it is against their patriotic duty to question those in power, swing your partner round and round.

But even then, I have to believe that America, what with all the dancing its been doing for four years and a half years now, is beginning to learn the steps a little better. The press briefing is actually a sign of that. When reviewing what was said, I end up having two things here: One is that McClellan is occasionally beginning to sound a lot like Baghdad Bob and the other is that when he isn’t sounding like the Iraqi Information Minister, he’s sounding an awful lot like Joel Osteen, the author of the self-help book Your Best Life Now. The line coming out of the administration is less General MacArthur, more Captain Kangaroo. His press briefing Monday was a stream of refusals to comment on something he already commented on, followed by a slew of insipid platitudes about freedom, topped off with some nice phony ad-speak about the “two-track strategy for succeeding in Iraq.”

Do you notice the language? It's not just a strategy; it's a two-track strategy for success. The phrase is certainly pleasant sounding even if it is a staid and a not-so creative use of positively connotated words to hide an uglier reality. It’s the same thing as referring to someone as “84 years young” as if removing the reminder that an octogenarian has been around for a while will somehow result in people confusing him or her with a thirtysomething. Just as people get old regardless of how we enumerate them, success in Iraq is not going to be achieved by an alliterative attempt at double-speak, which is in and of itself, just another dance.