What Happened (Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception)

Well--here's a little light reading. Some good lessons could be learned for the upcoming administration if they would read this. But I do not think there is much chance of that happening.

Scott McClellan, “What Happened” (Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception), Public Affairs, 2008

Scott McClellan began working for Governor George Bush in 1999 as his press spokesman just as Bush began his campaign for the presidency of the United States. Drawn to Bush’s strong successful record of bipartisan leadership and commitment to compassionate conservatism, and later inspired by Bush’s promise to restore dignity to a White House sullied by scandal and partisan warfare, McClellan would serve the president for more than seven years, becoming part of Bush’s inner circle of trusted advisers and attaining the job of White House Press Secretary. McClellan witnessed day to day and year to year exactly what happened to take the presidency disastrously and irretrievably off course.

My Notes:

Pg. 59: By and large, Bush and his campaign did a successful job of defining him and starting the process of changing the image of the Republican party nationally. Bush was elected with a clear agenda—tax cuts, education reform, strengthening Social Security, strong defense, and military transformation. He was also elected with a clear public image as a different kind of Republican—a “compassionate conservative” who understood and cared about the needs and interests of the middle class, the working class, and the poor, and was willing to use the government when necessary to help meet those needs.

Pg. 63: Understanding the permanent campaign’s impact on governing, both in the White House and Congress, is integral to grasping how Washington has gone astray, becoming ensnared in constant partisan bickering and warfare, and, in particular, how the presidency of George W. Bush wandered and remained so far off course by excessively embracing the permanent campaign and its tactics.

Pg. 64: The infiltration of politics into governance has been a feature of democracy from the beginning. But during the second half of the twentieth century, it became increasingly prominent and pervasive. The administration of Richard Nixon—the first president to begin institutionalizing a permanent political operation inside the White House—exemplified many of the pitfalls of the permanent campaign, with its enemies list, its abuse of the IRS and the Justice Department for political ends, and the dirty tricks associated with the Watergate affair, which ultimately destroyed the administration.

Too much of the permanent campaign mentality can cripple an administration. It brought down the Nixon presidency and nearly ended Clinton’s, despite—or because of—what Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz called its “spin doctors and well-oiled propaganda machine.” And as this book shows, it severely damaged the Bush White House, which arguably embraced and institutionalized the permanent campaign even more deeply than its predecessors. A second force shaping today’s political environment is the perpetual scandal culture, which was born as the permanent campaign was growing deep roots in Washington. This is a lasting legacy of the Nixon presidency; Watergate created a deep distrust of the White House and a more cynical view of politics.

Pg. 79: Rove’s 50-percent-plus-one strategy: As distinguished from the broad majority political strategy of consistently governing from the center and not catering too heavily to single-issue or narrowly focused partisan constituencies, the 50-percent-plus-one strategy emphasizes catering to ideological purists. For example, Bush appeased social conservatives by forcefully advocating passage of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage as we headed to Election Day in 2004; on another occasion he dramatically returned to Washington in the middle of the night from his home in Crawford to sign a federal law transferring the fate of Terri Schiavo to the federal courts, thereby involving the national government in a controversial issue typically handled by the states. (This sure got many people in the U.S. to write Living Wills.) Bush’s decision in 2001 to narrowly limit the federal government’s role in embryonic stem cell research and his later vetoing of legislation expanding it kept social conservatives appeased too, as did his support for legislation to ban partial birth abortion.

Pg. 112: The unity in Washington during the first few months after 9/11/2001 quickly disappeared. Rove in January 2002 was the first administration official to publicly make the case for using the war as a partisan issue, a marked shift in tone from Bush’s repeated emphasis on unity and bipartisanship in confronting and defeating radical Islamic terrorism. Rove’s statements infuriated suspicious Democrats, who condemned Rove for trying to politicize the war.

Pg. 130: The real motivating force behind Bush’s invasion of Iraq was his dream of imposing a democratically free nation in the midst of the middle east and thereby starting a transformation of the entire area to freely elected democratic governments. Many neoconservative intellectual supporters shared this view. As for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield, they were mainly interested in eliminating a threat to regional and global peace and greater economic security, and a little less enthralled by Bush’s vision of a world transformed by freedom. But during the campaign for war, this transformational vision for the region was downplayed by both the president and other members of his administration. Instead, they emphasized the threat of WMD and the possible link between Iraq and terrorism.

Pg. 134: The doctrine of preemption would become a cornerstone of the White House’s new national security strategy that would be released in mid-to late September 2002. Bush was now lowering the bar for engaging in preemptive war, a step that might have been more widely viewed as radical had it occurred prior to 9/11. Now the U.S. would not hesitate to use force if necessary to prempt not just an imminent threat but a grave and gathering one if need be. And this new principle encoded in our new national security strategy was clearly aimed in part at paving the way to removing Saddam Hussein from power by force.

Pg. 158: The real problem with the national media is the overemphasis on controversy, the excessive focus on who is winning and who is losing in Washington, and the constant search for something or someone to pick on and attack. These bad habits too often cause the larger truths that matter most to get lost in the mix.

Pg. 193: Bush’s strategic vision of changing the Middle East by establishing a free and democratic Iraq was one he emphasized in virtually every world leader meeting. These meeting early in Scotts tenure convinced him that Bush’s thinking on democratic transformation was the driving reason for our invasion of Iraq. It was a strategic mission much more grandiose than the one emphasized publicly of eliminating a grave and gathering danger in Iraq.

Pg. 247: All in all, the shape and direction of Bush’s second term were clear. The administration did not infuse fresh blood and new thinking from outside sources but eliminated some voices that had represented independent perspectives (such as Colin Powell’s) and elevated people who were known Bush loyalists, practically guaranteed not to challenge the conventional White House thinking (such as Condi Rice and Al Gonzales). And it reinforced the dominance of the permanent campaign within the administration by giving Karl Rove and even more powerful seat at the table, ensuring that political considerations would never be far from the center of any policy conversation during the second term.

Scott McClellan credibility was ultimately sunk by the Valerie Plame affair. He had been assured by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby that neither had anything to do with revealing to the press that Plame was a CIA operative. Of course, both had lied. There was a curious twist to reporter’s Cooper and Miller refusal to divulge their sources for the knowledge that Plame was CIA. The two reporters were not protecting courageous whistle-blowers revealing government wrongdoing in the public interest. Rather, they were shielding government officials who had used leaks as weapons of partisan warfare.

Pg. 313: Allowing the permanent campaign culture to remain in control may not take us into another unnecessary war, but it will continue to limit the opportunity for careful deliberation, bipartisan compromise, and meaningful solutions to the major problems all Americans want to see solved.