Hey, Scottie McClellan. Face it. You weren't that important!

In the old days when people valued character, memoirs were written years after the person "served" in the White House, not a couple of months. Even then they were written discreetly.

The sudden release of this book by the ex-press secretary to George W. Bush, What Happened, gives me pause to think that maybe the kid is nothing more than a opportunistic, greedy ingrate who doesn't want to work anymore if he can do the rest of his life on the backs of the men and women in the White House.

Follow the money; that's where the trouble usually starts.

You just think you know, Scottie, my boy.
George W. Bush is an MBA, a businessman from Texas. I believe I understand his management style. I takes a while to get on the inside of the "group." That may be why Scottie is so upset. He had to show more loyalty of more than a couple of years to get in. Maybe he just wasn't in the loop and all this is sour grapes.

I started working for this management style of closed doors in the 70s when they didn't "act" like yayhoos, they were yayhoos. Women were out, except for coffee bringing and extreme copying and clerical activities. An occasional confidant/assistant slipped in, but she was hardly ever ever a communications person and usually was a background and support. That was then. And she was me.

Before that, I had gone to college in Texas. was a "Yankee" and had been introduced to Texas boys and I found out how they do things early on. So, when I became an assistant to a couple of "important" men in a Texas oil company later in my single-mother life I fit right in. I also dated one of them for a little while, although he was not a Texan. (He was the only boss I ever dated in my long career. I found it so uncomfortable that I had to stop. He said he understood and was a gentleman about it.) I was a regular Della Street. I knew everything about the other executives, their wives. It was exciting and fun while it lasted, especially with the sales room right next to my office. Communications was five floors down.

Later, I wrote some occasional copy for a major Orange County ad agency and was assistant to its CEO president in the 80s. That was a big enough job. I still knew everything the partners did and everything about every employee but hardly fulfilling. My copy was about a client, not us.

Then as I became a better writer and more a confident person, I had some other high level jobs including working for the legal department for a major motor cycle manufacturer. They wouldn't let me know a thing about corporate issues even though I worked directly for the exec vice president for legal counsel.

Communications was a major part of that job. Like Scottie's. So...the trend is clear.

Not once did I get too involved in policy or was asked to. Not once was I told how things actually came to be. Not once was I privy to the actual ins and outs of the situation. I was given an assignment, asked for an opinion once in a while, and always asked to follow through on a task by their direction. I didn't get to be in on their meetings very often.

The real meetings
The ones where they drink bourbon and talk about the real stuff...after I went home at seven or eight in the evening...after I finished the drafts they wanted or the copy they wanted me to write. Oh, I was close to all of those men--and a couple of women. But not that close.

Never, I repeat, never was I asked to take responsibility for any part of a decision that was made by others. That was way above my pay scale. Nor was I consulted nor did I have all the facts of the problems before me. They never told me. They made sure not to. There's a reason for that, by the way. Communications is a special place. The less you know the less you can say.

For McClellan to flatter himself into thinking he had the total poop is the biggest laugh in Washington or any other big city. Just like the other little girls and boys running around with half truths about the war, about power, about money, about big companies, they are all FLAT wrong about how it all works. Where they get their ideas and notions is beyond me. I think a grown man who works in the White House, frankly, should know better.

Scott just thinks he knows and is acting out because of his disillusionment that maintaining power isn't as neat as he thought maybe it should be and running a country isn't as fun as Mama and Daddy said it might be.

Well, Scottie didn't stay long enough to see anything, to make any judgments worth making. (One thing I do know about guys like the president is they move methodically. There's no rushing them, and they're going to do what they do. But they're not slow. They have their own rhythm.)

But then that's the hallmark of the 21st century employee: moving on to the next opportunity and staying at that job for only about two years on the average, just enough time to take a quick look at something. In the executive suites it requires a few more years of camaraderie and friendship and maybe some trials by fire to see how one another reacts just to see who you can trust. Obviously, something told em they couldn't trust Scott.

Looks like they were right.

The painful truth is Scott McClellan wasn't very good at this job. I worried about his abilities when I first saw him in action. I thought he was too passive, not fast enough on the uptake. I watched the White House press corps walk on him. It was clear to me he didn't understand the basic argument of why we were in Iraq. No, from the sounds of the excerpts of his books he is contemptuous of the president's outrageous and naive restructuring of the middle east in the democratic model. How dare the president, McClellan seems to ask, as if democracy is as filthy a system as the old Stalinist communism.

(sigh)

Thanks for the read.