Ex-aide's tell-all has White House 'puzzled' and 'sad'

WASHINGTON — As President Bush's press secretary, Scott McClellan was a dutiful practitioner of the swift, efficient and highly coordinated strategy the White House typically employs to take on Bush's critics.

On Wednesday, McClellan got a taste of life on the other side.

As news of McClellan's new tell-all book — in which he calls the war in Iraq a "strategic blunder" and accuses Bush of engaging in "self-deception" — dominated the airwaves, the White House and a tight-knit group of former aides pushed back. They sought to paint the former press secretary as a disgruntled man trying to redeem his own reputation after long remaining silent about concerns he is suddenly taking public.

The result was a kind of public excommunication of McClellan, waged by some of the people with whom he once worked most closely, among them Karl Rove, the political strategist; Frances Fragos Townsend, the former domestic security adviser; Ari Fleischer, Bush's first press secretary; and Dan Bartlett, the former counselor to the president.

Their cries of betrayal served as a stern warning to other potential turncoats that, despite some well-publicized cracks, the Bush inner circle remains tight. Their language was so similar that the collective reaction amounted to one big inside-the-Beltway echo chamber.

All seemed to take their cues from Dana Perino, the current press secretary. Perino used the words "sad" and "puzzled" to describe the White House response, as if McClellan had undergone some kind of emotional breakdown, while making the case that if McClellan had problems with Bush, he should have raised them while in the president's employ.

And all seemed to suggest that maybe McClellan had been hijacked by liberal New York book editors who prodded him to turn out a memoir that did not reflect his own beliefs.

"This doesn't sound like Scott; it really doesn't," Rove said on the Fox News Channel. (In the book, McClellan accuses Rove of being untruthful with him about the administration's involvement in leaking the identity of a CIA operative, Valerie Wilson.)

"You've heard the way Scott briefed — it doesn't sound like him," Fleischer said. He said he could not wait to hear McClellan talk about the book on television, "to see if there's a written Scott and an oral Scott."