MCCURRYING FAVOR
CANNON, CARL M.
MCCURRYING FAVOR By Carl M. Cannon Near the end of the 1992 campaign, Paul Begala, a Clinton adviser, said that Marlin Fitzwater was the most political White House press secretary in American...
...And McCurry has done his part...
...Craig Shirley was “a paid adviser” to the Dole campaign, McCurry claimed...
...McCurry followed suit: “It’s fiction,” he said of the book...
...Carl M. Cannon covers the White House for the Baltimore Sun...
...That’s our position...
...You know, everything is politics now...
...There are times when they are absolutely right that I sound too partisan,” he says...
...In his tenure at the State Department, where he was spokesman for two years before moving to the White House, McCurry practiced this doctrine—and he does so now at the White House when the issue is national security or terrorism or foreign policy or something that eclipses party politics...
...And yet, there’s just this one flaw in Superman’s cape...
...Dole...
...Bob Dole has devoted an exemplary career in the United States Senate to important principles like balancing the budget and living within our means...
...Are they gonna cut education...
...But if you get on that campaign plane, I just don’t know how you avoid sounding that way,” says Fitzwater...
...That was beyond the pale—and McCurry later apologized to Gingrich—but he didn’t suddenly become as evenhanded as C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb...
...It’s clear that the White House has decided the briefings should be an aggressive exercise in salesmanship and argument— and McCurry is conducting them accordingly...
...In hindsight, I probably should have stayed in the White House and sent someone else out with Bush...
...The reason they’re trying to slow the rate of increase [in Medicare], I suppose, is because eventually they’d like to see the program just die and go away,” McCurry said on October 26, 1995...
...It’s also correct that this president is subject to the most vitriolic, partisan attacks that any recent American has faced...
...MCCURRYING FAVOR By Carl M. Cannon Near the end of the 1992 campaign, Paul Begala, a Clinton adviser, said that Marlin Fitzwater was the most political White House press secretary in American history...
...Four years later, Republicans have decided that line has a nice ring to it...
...We respect the individual conscience of each American on this difficult issue,” he replied...
...You have to step it up sometimes to just to defend against it...
...A Washington press secretary is the nexus between policy and politics—always,” Gillespie says...
...Dole has now embraced, indeed endorsed, an unrelenting, intolerant assault on a woman’s right to choose...
...He’s very partisan, but he understands our role,” she says...
...Their EPA holds Earth Day events in districts with vulnerable freshmen—perfectly tracking where the AFL-CIO buys ads...
...Or are they people following the dictates of their consciences...
...Asked months ago about the president’s position on Dole’s proposal earlier this year to rescind the 4.3 cent-per-gallon Clinton gas-tax increase, McCurry again was pugnacious: “When are they going to address the question of how you pay for this...
...One is that until recently, the Clinton-Gore campaign had no spokesman of its own, and McCurry was constantly being asked questions better directed to a campaign press secretary...
...He suggests a couple of reasons why he behaves as he does...
...He also returns phone calls, works hard, and doesn’t wing it, which means what he tells the media is generally Clinton administration policy...
...Asked last week if he thought there was anything to the Republican criticism of the president on the drug war or if it was all political, McCurry shrugged and said, “It’s politics...
...Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson State University professor and the acknowledged expert on White House press secretaries, says she believes there is something to McCurry’s explanation...
...There is one final factor at work with Clinton that affects McCurry’s performance, however...
...But McCurry’s primary answer is that those accusing him of excessive partisanship are ignoring the central context in which it exists, namely the invective directed at President Clinton...
...So I began reading about that and talking to people...
...You know, that’s probably what they’d like to see happen to seniors, too, if you think about it...
...President Clinton’s spokesman has brought droll humor, competence, and an atmosphere of civility to the White House briefing room...
...Those instincts, coupled with the Permanent Campaign mindset of the Clinton White House, have produced a daily briefing that is often indistinguishable from a Clinton-Gore press release, a DNC talking point, or for that matter an AFL-CIO attack ad...
...There was a time in American politics—it seems quaint now— when the presidential press secretary was the spokesman for the American government, not just one party that elected a president with 43 percent of the vote...
...There are days when you think he’ll tell you it’s really night outside...
...And it was rather sad to watch him humiliate himself by walking away from those firmly held beliefs...
...Are they gonna cut environmental protection...
...It’s better to talk to him away from the daily briefing,” says ABC’s Brit Hume...
...I mean, everything with these people is political...
...he was asked...
...That was a sad thing to watch,” McCurry told reporters two weeks ago after Dole unveiled his 15 percent tax-cut plan...
...it has leached into every level, including the White House briefing room...
...Helen Thomas, the venerable UPI correspondent McCurry sometimes makes play the straight man in his daily banter, speaks highly of him...
...The Republican platform plank on this issue is intolerant...
...So he took his cue from someone who was: George Stephanopoulos...
...We have a tolerance plank in our platform,” McCurry said stubbornly...
...McCurry is obliged to counter...
...I’ll answer your question about the president’s intentions when Senator Dole does...
...If that sounds simultaneously like a tough political counterattack as well as a backhanded defense of McCurry, that’s because Gillespie is a longtime political flack himself—and McCurry’s Republican counterparts secretly like him...
...Mike McCurry is the most partisan press secretary in history,” says Republican National Committee communications director Ed Gillespie...
...And remember that McCurry wasn’t even a Clinton guy when he came to the White House...
...When he talks about those things he gets a different look on his face, he speaks in a different voice,” says White House communications director Donald Baer...
...He has fulfilled his promise, made his first day on the job, to bring some much-needed levity to a largely humorless White House press operation...
...The president doesn’t really deserve the representation he gets from Mike McCurry...
...Later, in the same briefing, when McCurry was asked about language accommodating to pro-lifers at the Democrats’ Chicago convention, he decided that those opposed to abortion were worthy of respect—provided they were Democrats...
...But she has no illusions about whom he’s really working for...
...When you’re out there answering questions five days a week, you’re bound to commit a miscue from time to time...
...He’s more partisan— I was struck by that,” she says flatly of McCurry, whom she likes a great deal...
...McCurry himself does not rely on any distinction between foreign and domestic policy when asked about Republican complaints that he’s been too partisan...
...Despite what Begala said, in terms of my background [as a bureaucrat], I was probably the least partisan press secretary in history...
...It seemed so different from what he’s like as a person...
...He uses irony, sarcasm, and wit in the political zone, but he has a deft touch when discussing tragedy or the delicate areas of foreign policy,” says Tony Blankley, Newt Gingrich’s mouthpiece...
...He also concedes that sometimes he just, well, blows it...
...Well, then, which was it...
...Most reporters like the guy, too...
...He has also brought his partisan reflexes, honed during years of laboring for Democrats in Congress, Democratic candidates, and the Democratic National Committee...
...Asked the next day about the Republican platform in San Diego, McCurry responded: “Mr...
...And so is Mr...
...Clinton has been known to berate his aides for the supposed transgression of not defending him strongly enough...
...And McCurry is the most partisan press secretary in history because he’s working in the most political White House in history...
...Marlin Fitzwater, the subject of Begala’s jibe, also believes that it’s next to impossible for a White House press secretary to stay above the fray in an election year...
...Are they going to cut Social Security...
...That happened to be not quite true, but really, what’s the difference in an election year...
...To his credit, he concedes the criticism is sometimes valid...
...Before FBI agent Gary Aldrich’s book ever hit the bookstores, Stephanopoulos had asserted that Craig Livingstone had been hired by deceased deputy White House counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., that Aldrich publicist Craig Shirley was an adviser to Bob Dole, that Aldrich was “a pathological liar,” and that the book was a “Republican smear campaign...
...I asked him once if he’d ever lie to us and he said, ‘No, but I’d tell the truth slowly.’” Telling the truth slowly is a nice little euphemism for how the Clinton administration has talked about Medicare and the federal budget during the past year...
...Are pro-lifers intolerant bigots...
...Are they gonna cut Medicare...
...And I think it’s true that the partisanship of the national government is just much more intense than it used to be...
Vol. 1 • September 1996 • No. 49
