Ex-press secretary exposes capital's 'permanent campaign'

WASHINGTON -- In a White House full of Bush loyalists, none was more loyal than Scott McClellan, the press secretary who spread the company line for all the government to follow each day. His word, it turns out, was worthless, his confessional memoir a glimpse into Washington's world of spin and even outright deception.

Instead of effective government, Americans were subjected to a "permanent campaign" that was "all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage," McClellan writes in a book that harshly criticizes Bush. "Presidential initiatives from health care programs to foreign invasions are regularly devised, named, timed and launched with one eye (or both eyes) on the electoral calendar."

The spokesman's book is called "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

Governing via endless campaigning is not a new phenomenon, but it accelerated markedly during the Clinton White House and then the Bush administration. Bush strategist Karl Rove had a strong hand in both politics and governing as overseer of key offices, including not only openly political affairs and long-range strategic planning but as liaison for intergovernmental affairs, focusing on state and local officials.

Bush's presidency "wandered and remained so far off course by excessively embracing the permanent campaign and its tactics," McClellan writes. He says Bush relied on an aggressive "political propaganda campaign" instead of the truth to sell the Iraq war.

That's about right, says Brookings Institution political analyst Thomas Mann, co-author of a book titled "The Permanent Campaign."

"It was such a hyped-up effort to frame the problem and the choices in a way that really didn't do justice to the complexity of the arguments, the intelligence," Mann said. Though all presidents try to "control the message," he said, "it was really a way of preventing that discussion. It just had enormously harmful consequences. I think they carried it to a level not heretofore seen."

McClellan is not the first presidential spokesman to write a tell-all book, but his is certainly the harshest, at least in recent memory. He says his words as press secretary were sincere but he has come to realize that "some of them were badly misguided. ... I've tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured."

White House colleagues were stunned but not lacking for a response.

"We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew," said Dana Perino, the current press secretary who was first hired by McClellan as a deputy.

Later in the day, she relayed the reaction of Bush himself: "He's puzzled, he doesn't recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years."