The last time I bought and read a kiss-and-tell book was 22 years ago when David Stockman's The Triumph of Politics was published. Most are uninteresting and poorly written. I don't want to help create a market for them and in the process encourage others to be writen and published. I have far more respect for those who wait to write them than those who rush them into print and are willing to trade their confidences for a few sheckles.
So I'm not going to buy Scott McClellan's book.
But this is not about him or his book in any case; it's about the Bush administration's massive response to it's publication.
The key phrase is "nondenial denial."
I first remember hearing it during Watergate, when the Nixon White House repeatedly denied accusations with angry sounding words and tones that actually meant very little when you read them closely. The Nixon folks typically denounced those making the allegations or even just asking the questions. They or their publications were said to be no friend of the president's or the administration. They were accused of being disloyal and unAmerican.
But nothing done during the Nixon years compares to what the Bush administration has done in response to McClellan's book and publicity tour.
If you read the massive retaliation carefully, you quickly realize that very little is actually being denied or disproven with facts. Instead, the White House and its allies haven't just resurrected nondenial denials, they've taken them to a new level and made them into an art form.
The first wave was that this was not the McClellan they knew.
The second wave was that he was being disloyal.
The third wave was that McClellan couldn't possibly know what he wrote about because he wasn't actually in some of the meetings at which the decisions were made.
The fourth wave was that McClellan wasn't really as close to the president as everyone previously said he was.
The fifth wave was a throwback line: administration allies again said that the intelligence was wrong even though the information the White House was relying on was supplied by its own intelligence agencies. In other words, the administration misinformed itself and so shouldn't be held responsible.
None of this is surprising. This is, after all, the same administration that accused its first Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neil, of criminal behavior when he wrote a tell-all book about his experiences that was critical of the president. It turned out that the documents the administration hinted he had stolen to write the book were actually given to him by...drumroll please...the administration.
I truly don't know whether what McClellan is charging in his book is true. But the fact that the response from the administration used the nondenial denial strategy with such precision makes it hard to believe anything else but that the book really hit a number of very sore spots for the White House.
Stan, If the White House
Stan,
If the White House feels compelled to respond to your criticism, here's what I expect from them:
"If our responses are non-denial denials that would not deny the possibility of deniability."
Bush is Nixon?
So now Bush is Nixon? Whatever happened to Bush is Hitler? I can't track all the switches and changes in Bush Derangement Syndrome.
The non-denial denial worked
The non-denial denial worked pretty well with the Dan Rather thing.
I work in politics on a teeny, micro scale with corporate boards (and shareholders), nonprofit boards (and memberships), and sometimes unions (and memberships) both as a lawyer and a board officer as the case may be.
That scale of politics is teensy compared to Washington of course, but the incentives driving political behavior are always the same. There are always people screwing up, and people charging others with screwing up (rightly or wrongly -- often enough with bad motives but rightly anyhow), and a minority of hard workers being punished for good deeds, and an "electorate" that doesn't know 10% of what is really going on and is making electoral decisions on the basis of general impressions that everyone is trying to manipulate.
In this situation the "non-denial denial" even when one is totally innocent and pure is often the only rational way to go. If you jump up to deny in full detail every charge that you are totally innocent of you not only let the other side exhaust you, you do their research for them. They charge and you deny repeatedly until they charge and you hedge -- then they know they've got you.
It's often much better to just respond with a political equivalent of, "Eh, whatever", and get on with your job. Often you are in fact being challenged to prove a negative, so what else can you really do?
(I remember when Bush The First was being charged in slimey stories planted by the politial opposition, whoever they were, with having had an adulterous affair. How was he supposed to prove that he never had? So he just said "Never, harumph, wouldn't do that" and moved on.)
Some of Rather's people actually said later that they went ahead with that story because Bush's PR people didn't deny it -- they assumed the bogus papers were genuine because Bush's people should have told them if they were false, i.e. Bush's people should have done their job of verifying the charges for them (the defendant should do the prosecutor's job). But that's not true and they paid the righteous price for it. The non-denial worked great for the non-denier there.
I'm not saying the guilty never use non-denials too, nor that these Bushies aren't guilty of plenty.
But I do believe that reading non-denial denials as evidence of guilt is a mistake. Selective observation. When politicians whom one believes to be innocent and ethical (or more likely, just on one's own side) use them one doesn't notice. (Silly charges, beneath deserving a serious answer.) When a Nixon uses them, one does.
In legal terms, it means one believes that just making a verbal charge by itself meets the burden of proof that the other side is guilty of something if the other side doesn't respond -- which just isn't true.
I've made plenty of non-denial denials, so have my clients, we are almost always innocent, and we have no convictions yet, so the things work, both ways.
Rushing?
"I have far more respect for those who wait to write them than those who rush them into print and are willing to trade their confidences for a few sheckles."
'Rushing' would have meant printing them a couple of years ago. By now, Scott is merely confirming what we unserious liberals knew back in '03-'04.
What is that ?
I' m vers suspecious about this election.
Yet Another Budget Wonk
At leat elections is over in US.
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