I have developed a weird fascination -- bordering on obsession -- with Scott McClellan, the White House’s charm-challenged spokesperson. Who would have thought anyone could make Ari Fleischer appear sexy and scintillating?
I’m loath to admit it, but I find myself arranging my schedule around his regularly scheduled press briefings. And when circumstances beyond my control force me to be away, I never fail to TiVo him (in which case, I prefer to watch him alone, late at night, nursing a glass of bubbly… water).
Such is my McClellan fixation, that when I found myself seated at the same table as his wife at the White House Correspondent’s dinner last month, I felt like the Other Woman running into the Wife.
Scottie was seated on the dais and, of course, I could not take my eyes off of him. Even when Laura Bush was doing her bestiality joke. Indeed, especially when Laura Bush was doing her bestiality joke.
But in the interest of transparency, I’ve finally decided to go public with my addiction and launch an occasional Checking In With Scottie series, in which I’ll bring you the best of Scottie and link to my fellow addicts over at First Draft, who’ve been pioneers in obsessing over Scottie long before HuffPost was born.
It was Holden at FD who red-flagged the hands-down best post-speech Scottie-ism. When asked about criticism of the president’s linking of 9/11 and Iraq, Scottie responded, “And who made any suggestion of a link to the attacks?” Uh, that would be your boss Scott -- you know, the guy who brought up 9/11 five times in his big speech on Iraq.
Of course, this kind of answer is precisely what makes Scottie so endearing and compelling: his willingness to sound like an utter imbecile in the cause of covering his boss’s ass.
And it’s not just his boss… there he was last Thursday (yes, I do keep transcripts of his appearances pressed into my diary with gardenia petals), defending the Veep’s widely-ridiculed “last throes” comment.
First, he fell back on his default defense: “It doesn’t appear that you’ve looked at the context of his comments. And I would encourage you to do that.” Context is always a very big deal to Scottie. And so is condescension. But on this occasion he went even further, twice asking a reporter, “You were in the interview?”… thus setting a new journalistic standard, wherein to understand what was said in an interview you have to actually be in the room at the time of the interview. But if, in the Scottie universe, physical proximity = understanding, why does he, the beneficiary of so much physical proximity to the commander-in-chief, always sound so winningly clueless?
Unfolding…