Yesterday I blogged on Scott McClennan's "tell all" book about his time as Press Secretary in the Bush administration. A couple good reviews are up. Read Peggy Noonan's review. She finds McClellan to be a poor spokesman for a message that needs to be spread. While finding the book clunky, dull, and at times embarrassingly ignorant, Noonan opines that McClellan is on to something when he denounces the culture of the "permanent campaign." Many moons ago I wrote on the permanent campaign, citing political scientists John Maltese and Joseph Pika to this end:
The problem with such tactics is that campaigning--by its very nature--is adversarial, while governing is--or at lest should be--largely collaborative. As [Hugh] Heclo puts it, "campaigning is self-centered, and governing is group-centered." When the permanent campaign becomes the predominant governing style, however, collaboration becomes difficult. Not surprisingly, recent years have seen a breakdown of the elite bargaining community that used to collaborate to produce policy.
I suggested yesterday that Douglas Feith's book is likely a much sounder take on the Bush presidency. Noonan agrees in her conclusion.
What's needed now? More memoirs, more data, more information, more testimony. More serious books, like Doug Feith's. More "this is what I saw" and "this is what is true." Feed history.
As Paul Mirengoff writes, the media has ignored Feith's book while playing up the more controversial McClellan work.
McClellan’s book is a topic of intense discussion not just at the Post but at USA Today and the New York Times. The latter two organs have refused to report on Feith’s book (the Times turned down three separate stories by star reporter James Risen), and the Post has refused to review it. Yet, for reasons discussed below, there can be little question as to which book is more valuable when it comes to understanding why we went to war in Iraq and whether it made sense to do so. (snip)
Feith’s book stands in sharp contrast. First, unlike McClellan, Feith was at the center of the policy-making at issue. Second, his book provides detailed accounts of key meetings based on contemporaneous notes. And it includes more than 30 pages of original source material plus almost 90 pages of endnotes. Readers can thus determine for themselves whether the author is providing a reliable account or merely settling scores and/or trying to make a buck (Feith, by the way, is donating all proceeds from his book to help Iraq war veterans). Yet the MSM is breathless over McClellan’s book, while it continues studiously to ignore Feith's.
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