When Terry McAuliffe has the moral high ground, you know you are in trouble.
[Politico]I would also say, and I gotta add a personal thing, I never like it when someone works for someone and then comes out and writes a book trashing them. I just think that is, I don’t care if it is politics or life, if he was that upset about everything, he should have quit. Remember Gerald Ford’s press secretary quit when he disagreed with pardoning, Ford pardoning Nixon. If you don’t agree, then get out. And I just, I find it abhorrent the way these people come out and write books about their boss. It made ’em money, it made ’em prestige, it gave them all this power and then they turn around and slap ’em. I just, I gotta tell you, I just uh, I don’t care who it is- Democrat, Republican- it’s wrong.
And a little Bob Dole for good measure.
[Foxnews]”There are miserable creatures like you in every administration who don’t have the guts to speak up or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or colleagues,” the five-term Kansas senator wrote to McClellan. “No, your type soaks up the benefits of power, revels in the limelight for years, then quits, and spurred on by greed, cashes in with a scathing critique.”
He continues: “When the money starts rolling in you should donate it to a worthy cause, something like, ‘Biting The Hand That Fed Me.’ Another thought is to weasel your way back into the White House if a Democrat is elected. That would provide a good set up for a second book deal in a few years.”
May 31, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Kudos to Bob Dole and (gulp) Terry McAuliffe.
You look at McClellan and a recent press secretary Tony Snow, who no one has more desperation to write a tell all book at this time, and it is total swine vs. total class.
One underestimation from Bob Dole: Not too many political organizations are going to be offering anyone a future position when they have “Tell-All-Author” on their resume.
May 31, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Wow. If Bob Dole talked like that on the campaign trail, he may have won. You go Bob! Tell it like it is.
May 31, 2008 at 8:25 pm
As one who has worked two blocks west of the White House for nearly three decades, I look upon this episode with more than dismay over disloyalty or opportunism. More than a few Republicans have been disenchanted with this administration, and more than a few have come out and said so. (I generally vote Republican, and I’ve said as much in my writing.)
But that’s not the issue for me. It is the realization that it will never matter whether what McClellan has written has any merit. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But in all the talk about him being a traitor who cashes in on an election year (as if this were somehow a unique phenomenon), it will become a matter of personalities over issues. It’s not about “What Happened;” it’s about where he was when it did.
Why did he stay on so long if he had reservations? Why do any of us stay on a job as long as we do when things go south? Would he have been better off waiting until the election was over, or would it have been old hat by then? Folks inside the Beltway will tell you, that Bush is known to be verbally abusive with his staff, even in the presence of other staff members. Some will say he’s still a spoiled-rich frat boy at heart, who didn’t know beans about foreign affairs before running for President. How much do you owe a guy like that, especially after he gives you the boot?
I’m not saying McClellan should or shouldn’t have written the book. I’m saying that most people with an opinion about it will never read it. They assume they don’t have to.