From 50,000 Feet

What does a PR person owe their client or their boss when they are no longer being paid to speak for them or keep their secrets? The question comes up, obviously, with the publication of Scott McClellan’s memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

President Bush’s current spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said Bush “he doesn’t recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years; and (is) disappointed that if he had these concerns and these thoughts he never came to him or anyone else on the staff that we know of.”

Perhaps that’s because McClellan sees things differently now.  Perhaps he was always repulsed by the “deception,” but was just too chicken to say anything.  McClellan seems unwilling to take a clear stand either way.  Instead, from what I’ve read so far, he wants to be able to analyze the Bush Administrations failings from afar, like a pundit.  As if he was never personally involved with it.

McClellan’s memoir is not a particularly flattering portrayal of the role a public relations professional plays in a high-profile organization.  He seems to feel that, as a spokesman, he can excuse himself from responsibility for his clients’ deeds and his own words, as if his participation didn’t matter. In McClellan’s view, he’s at liberty now to join with the same critics of the Bush Administration’s honesty that he used to parry at daily press briefings.  In trying to go easy on himself, however, he is undermining whatever remaining credibility the PR industry can claim for itself.

From the excerpt in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal:

As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided. In these pages, I’ve tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured.

My friends and former colleagues who lived and worked or are still working inside that bubble may not be happy with the perspective I present here. Many of them, I’m sure, remain convinced that the Bush administration has been fundamentally correct in its most controversial policy judgments, and that the dis-esteem in which most Americans currently hold it is undeserved.

Only time will tell. But I’ve become genuinely convinced otherwise.

His use of the word “genuinely” is revealing.  Before he’s 100 words into his story, he’s defending himself from a charge he knows is coming:  That his publisher and his publisher’s publicist convinced him to manufacture controversy and disagreement with his former boss because that would sell more books than another dime-a-dozen White House memoir.

Does McClellan persuade us that the scales “genuinely” have fallen from his eyes?  The test I would apply to his words is to compare what he claims to believe now with what he would have had to believe when he was in the White House.  If this is a genuine conversion, his own mistakes, misjudgments and areas of ignorance would be central to his case.

Unfortunately, what I found in the WSJ excerpt was an unwillingness to look at himself critically.  McClellan writes:

Most of our elected leaders in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, are good, decent people. Yet too many of them today have made a practice of shunning truth and the high level of openness and forthrightness required to discover it.

Is this what “good, decent people” do?  If they shun the truth, doesn’t that make them liars?  No, says McClellan, because

Most of it is not willful or conscious.

Yikes.  Our government is run by a bunch of sleepwalkers? Robots programmed to lie?  What he’s describing is epistemologically tricky.  If you’re not conscious of lying, then by definition you’re not lying.  A liar must have intent to deceive. According to Scott McClellan, neither he nor anyone he knew acted with such intent.  He could have been lied to, and innocently conveyed the lie; but if someone has lied to you and callously used you as an instrument to convey the lie, you can hardly call them “good and decent.”

You could say, “I should have checked out the story more. I thought I was telling the truth, but I ignored information that was available that would have shown me that I was transmitting lies.” That would at least suggest he bore some responsibility for the deception, by choosing to avert his eyes from an easily discernable truth.

But that’s not what McClellan says.  Instead he comes up with this:

Rather, it is part of the modern Washington game that has become the accepted norm.

As I explain in this book, Washington has become the home of the permanent campaign, a game of endless politicking based on the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth, and spin.

He uses the metaphor of “a game” to describe various manipulations of the truth.  Can you play a game you don’t know you’re playing?  No.  Games have rules.  Games have strategies.  You can’t play a game successfully if you aren’t following the rules and aren’t aware of the strategies.  You don’t play a game, any game, without intent.

What this almost sounds like is the kind of excuse liberals are accused of making for inner-city criminals; that they’re a product of their environment, that the culture is to blame.  In Scott McClellan’s view, therefore, personal responsibility is out the window, especially his own.

Let’s look at how he analyzes this culture, this set of social norms encouraging deception, this “game.”  He apparently sees it as something new:

Governing has become an appendage of politics rather than the other way around, with electoral victory and the control of power as the sole measures of success.

What did he think before writing this book? It’s not as if he was a budget analyst or a flood-control engineer. He was a flack.  Very few flacks work for government who don’t come out of politics or at least have a rudimentary comprehension of it.  They wouldn’t survive otherwise.  And anyone who knows anything about the relationship between government and politics would know that there hasn’t been a president since George Washington who successfully divorced his political interests from the act of governing.

For McClellan to claim this as a new insight is disingenuous.  His mother was an elected official in Texas.  When he went to the White House, he knew exactly what he was getting into.

McClellan tries to define the “permanent campaign,” a political innovation he claims came out of the Bill Clinton years.

That means shaping the narrative before it shapes you. Candor and honesty are pushed to the side in the battle to win the latest news cycle…

So many buzzwords, so little time:  Narrative and news cycle.

I find McClellan’s use of the vogue word “narrative” as grating as I find it when Daily Kos uses it.  All it really means is telling a coherent story, and trying to prevent your opposition from telling theirs by undermining it.

Political pundits and operatives have been talking about the “news cycle” since before Bush’s father took office.  The idea was born around the regular cycles of daily publication and nightly news, in which new batches of news were released 24 hours after the previous batch. You wanted that day’s headline or top TV story to be the story you hoped to tell. You wanted your quotes near the top, and your adversary’s quotes in paragraph 16.

Nowadays, no one is sure what the frequency of a news cycle is.  It has become fashionable to say “the news cycle is 24 hours now,” but what does that mean?  That there is a news cycle in each of those 24 hours?  For all practical purposes, there is no “news cycle” anymore, just a continuous stream of information and political posturing.

The news cycle is a particularly irrelevant metaphor when it comes to political news.  Political news consumers live in a kind of virtual reality battlefield, a World of Warcraft in which the various news and commentary sources each occupy different parts of the landscape.  Each outlet reacts differently to particular news events, depending on their style and political bias. Rush Limbaugh will say one thing, but Keith Olbermann will say another, and both will ignore or distort stories that don’t conform to their ideology.

The so-called “mainstream” news sources are hemorrhaging viewers and readers, and their credibility is under continual attack. Some traditionally objective news outlets seem to have given up any pretense of even-handedness. It now makes more commercial sense to target a partisan audience with news that matches their preconceptions, rather than trying to be fair, which ends up annoying and alienating half your audience.

The buzzword for this is “cocooning.”  Blue people want to read blue news that reaffirms their blueness, and red people want to live where the sea and sky are red.  When a red person sees a blue news source, and vice versa, they expect to get outraged.  But since they would prefer not to be outraged, cocooned news consumers usually don’t venture out, and instead swap legends about what the other color says and does.  It’s all rather reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss book.

I digress, except to demonstrate that McClellan’s view of the political media climate–the one that’s so awful and  liable for our political woes–is strangely out of date.

After expressing his disappointment that Bush practiced the “permanent campaign” just as much as Bill Clinton did, McClellan discusses the press’ role:

The permanent campaign also ensnares the media, who become complicit enablers of its polarizing effects. They emphasize conflict, controversy and negativity, focusing not on the real-world impact of policies and their larger, underlying truths but on the horse race aspects of politics – who’s winning, who’s losing, and why…

This is true as far as it goes.  But any news editor would tell you, and would have told you 100 years ago, conflict and controversy excite the audience, and the absence of conflict and controversy bores them and makes them go elsewhere.   Without conflict, you don’t have a story and stories are what all news outlets are comprised of.

Is McClellan, whose entire career has been as a press spokesman, trying to suggest the media’s preference for conflict is a surprise to him?

The press amplifies the talking points of one or both parties in its coverage, thereby spreading distortions, half-truths, and occasionally outright lies in an effort to seize the limelight and have something or someone to pick on. And by overemphasizing conflict and controversy and by reducing complex and important issues to convenient, black-and-white story lines and seven-second sound bites the media exacerbate the problem, thereby making it incredibly hard even for well-intentioned leaders to clarify and correct the misunderstandings and oversimplifications that dominate the political conversation.

There’s lots of information out there, especially now, for anyone who wants it.  Every federal department has a website packed with information from which good stories could be extracted.  Scott McClellan’s job involved providing extensive daily briefings, during which he had every opportunity to enlighten us. But despite all this information and all this attention, he couldn’t make “complex and important issues” interesting enough.  Is that the press’ fault, or was he, perhaps, an incompetent flack?

At this point, you can almost hear McClellan’s editor saying, “okay fine, Scott, all this high-minded crap is okay, if not particularly original.  But when are you going to trash Bush?”So here’s his first shot:

When Bush was making up his mind to pursue regime change in Iraq, it is clear that his national security team did little to slow him down, to help him fully understand the tinderbox he was opening and the potential risks in doing so. I know the president pretty well. I believe that, if he had been given a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen the costs of war – more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens dead – he would have never made the decision to invade, despite what he might say or feel he has to say publicly.

So…Is Scott saying Bush lied?  Sort of.  He claims to know what Bush really thinks, and because he’s not saying what you think he thinks, that makes Bush possibly dishonest. Assuming McClellan’s mind-reading of Bush is accurate.

But there’s a more fundamental problem.  When did McClellan become aware that the “national security team” was failing to inform Bush of the “potential risks?” When he was in the White House, watching it happen?  Or did he somehow suppress this knowledge, bury the memory, only to have it come rushing out now, just in time to write his version of Mommie Dearest?

An even more fundamental problem was the way his advisers decided to pursue a political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people. It was all part of the way the White House operated and Washington functioned, and no one seemed to see any problem with using such an approach on an issue as grave as war.

McClellan has this odd habit as a writer of removing himself from situations in which he played a vital role, and writing as if he was a commentator.  “No one seemed to see any problem…”  Well, what about you, Scott?  Did you see any problem?  If you did, why didn’t you resign in protest?  And if you didn’t, can you explain why you didn’t?

Scrolling to the final paragraphs of the WSJ’s excerpt, McClellan’s confusion about how to explain himself mestatisizes into sheer cognitive dissonance:

I still like and admire George W. Bush. I consider him a fundamentally decent person, and I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people. But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.

Your head just explodes here. Bush is decent, the White House didn’t “consciously” practice deception, however they ran a propaganda campaign that lacked “candor and honesty.”  This is worse than President’s Reagan’s legendary “Mistakes were made.”  McClellan is saying, “Lies were told.”

Had a high level of openness and forthrightness been embraced from the outset of his administration, I believe President Bush’s public standing would be stronger today.

McClellan was there “from the outset of his administration.”  You can look it up.  If anyone had the opportunity to promote “openness and forthrightness,” it was him.   But at least in the excerpts provided, you don’t get the mea culpas, you don’t get the “I was just following orders,” you don’t even get the “I objected privately.”  McClellan simply disappears himself.

He can’t even burn his bridges properly.  He doesn’t want his former colleagues or his former boss to dislike him, so he keeps calling them good and decent, as if that will offset calling them liars.

I’m not here to judge the merits of his criticism, except to say the only thing new about his views is the fact that he’s the one who’s saying them.  But in embracing these criticisms, McClellan takes no responsibility for his previous actions or beliefs.

That’s where the disloyalty strikes me as most amoral.  He was hardly a passive participant in what he calls the “game” of Washington.  As Press Secretary to the President, McClellan was a star player.  The fact that he now embraces the talking points of Bush’s political foes seems like nothing more than a defection from the losing team to the winning team.  Can you imagine McClellan writing this book if the Iraq war was widely considered a success?

In fact, McClellan is a little worried about that, so, just to cover all the bases, he allows as how the Iraq war policy, this product of “deception” and “propaganda,” might turn out okay in the end:

All the president can do today is hope that his vision of Iraq will ultimately come true, putting the Middle East on a new path and vindicating his decision to go to war. I would welcome such a development as good for America, good for Iraq, and good for the world.

McClellan is like a marketer who touts the benefits of, say, processed cheese snack foods until the PR contract ends, at which point he presents himself to the world as a proponent of organic dairy products, deeply concerned about the additives in processed cheese snack foods.  His apparent change of heart really doesn’t mean anything.  It’s just a switch from one client to the other.  Unless he’s willing to return all the money earned from the processed cheese snack food client, and explain how he got it so wrong, we would be  free to assume he doesn’t believe the new statements any more than he believed the previous ones.

Scott McClellan is a guy who will flack for whichever cheese is paying his fee.  McClellan got paid his White House salary; and now he’s making money from his publisher by opposing the people who paid him.

But what he’s written — and what he has left out — is a far more damning expose of himself than of the president or the political system.  And therefore, it’s a damning expose of the current state of the PR profession.  The president’s press secretary always is sort of the mayor of PR-land.  Their techniques are imitated, their failings are analyzed by thousands of flacks who imagine themselves in his shoes.  There is no more high-profile PR job in the United States.

Scott McClellan defined the PR profession downward during his misbegotten tenure, and has done further damage with this book. PR people should always bear in mind that the public relies on the statements they make, and not just for one “news cycle.” Despite general cynicism about PR, a persuasive statement will persuade many if the person making the statement has integrity.  McClellan asks us, in so many words, not to expect integrity from him, or anyone else who does what he does for a living. McClellan doesn’t explain how he changed his mind about Bush, Iraq or anything else. He doesn’t confess to intentionally lying. He just wants you to understand you should never have believed the things he said.  The logical conclusion is that all PR people are unaccountable purveyors of lies; hired guns who will switch sides at the drop of a dollar bill. I don’t think that’s true, but it will be hard to argue the case for PR people while McClellan is out there shaming his profession.

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Tags: George Bush, loyalty, lying, permanent campaign, PR, publishing, Scott McClellan, truth, What Happened