Many people had already weighed in on former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s book, but today a column of interest was published which deserves some attention; David Frum’s take on McClellan and his book is, in my opinion, spot-on and refreshing.

Frum starts off by summarizing how both the right and left have reacted to McClellan’s book (predictable to say the least). The right says he betrayed conservatives, the left says his ‘conversion’ came too late.

He then writes what most of us thought back when “Scottie” was still trying to answer questions of the media:

If you ever watched McClellan’s televised confrontations with the savage White House press corps, you probably thought: This is terrible! The man has no business being up there. He looks frightened, like a schoolboy trying to retrieve his mittens from a persecuting gang of bullies. His words stumble and clomber. When he has good news to announce, he cannot elicit any interest; when the news is bad, his clumsy efforts to evade questions only draw more attention than ever.

Quite right. If there ever was a bad press secretary, it’s McClellan.

Why was he so bad? Well, Frum explains, he missed some much-needed qualities and Bush et al. kept him in the dark on a variety of issues:

 As the current press secretary Dana Perino daily reminds us, you don’t have to be a genius to succeed as press secretary. But you do need (1) composure under fire, (2) verbal fluency, (3) an understanding of the imperatives of the news business and (4) access to the interior workings of the administration. McClellan never possessed qualities (1) and (2), and his colleagues refused to grant him (4).

So, he missed the qualities a press secretary should have. This was obvious to everyone. But still Bush kept him. Why? Well, it seems that Bush cares more about loyalty than quality. As a result, his main advisers are often not intelligent or not able to fulfill the roles described to them.

 In these deficiencies, McClellan was not alone. George W. Bush brought most of his White House team with him from Texas. Except for Karl Rove, these Texans were a strikingly inadequate bunch. Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzalez, Karen Hughes, Al Hawkins, Andy Card (the last not a Texan, but a lifelong Bush family retainer) — they were more like characters from The Office than the sort of people one would expect to find at the supreme height of government in the world’s most powerful nation. McClellan, too, started in Bush’s governor’s office, and if he never belonged to the innermost circle of power, he nonetheless gained closer proximity than would be available to almost anyone who did not first serve in Texas.

That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent. But that did not happen often with the Bush team.

Bush demanded a very personal kind of loyalty, a loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to him and his own career. Perhaps unconsciously, he tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning.

And then, requiring personal loyalty, and bullying people into becoming even more loyal, which caused them basically to stop thinking for themselves:

Had Bush been a more active manager, these subordinated personalities might have done him less harm. But after choosing people he could dominate, he then delegated them enormous power. He created a closed loop in which the people entrusted with the most responsibility were precisely those who most dreaded responsibility — Condoleezza Rice being the most important and most damaging example.

Yet as the proverb warns us, even worms will turn.
For three years, Bush left Scott McClellan in a position for which he was unsuited and in which he must have suffered terrible anxiety and stress. Finally, McClellan was deputed to act as the administration’s shield and buffer in the Valerie Plame leak case. The administration had nothing to fear from the truth, but McClellan was assigned to say things that later proved untrue. Understandably, he feels terrible bitterness about the episode — and predictably, a book publisher offered him the opportunity to exact his revenge.

The lesson of the story according to Frum: “weak personalities break under pressure. And since a White House is the world’s highest-pressure environment, a wise president will seek to staff it with strong personalities.” Therefore, instead of demanding personal loyalty – merely – Bush should have offered “a compelling vision and ideal — a cause that people can serve without feeling servile.”

The above is, in my opinion, correct. There is little to nothing I can add to it. However, it’s not suffice; personal loyalty itself seems to be greatly overestimated by Bush, and quality underestimated. It’s interesting to see that Frum doesn’t write in his ’solution’ that a president should choose capable people for key-positions, he just writes “strong personalities.” A strong personality isn’t necessarily a good press secretary or a good secretary of state.