The Real Bush White House

The real Bush White House is nothing close to what former press secretary Scott McClellan describes in his new book What Happened according to Jaime Sneider in The Weekly Standard. Jaime was Bush's former deputy associate director of White House Communications. Jaime poignantly states:

Despite everyone's best intentions, it became apparent to me that the Bush White House regarded safeguarding its image and communicating a message to the public as low on its list of priorities. This is not entirely to its discredit. After all, the White House is fighting a serious war against a determined enemy. But correcting outright errors in wire stories (including those about the war on terror) took hours, if not days. Any document to be circulated with the press frequently made it into the hands of dozens of staff-members who had to sign off on them. Often this included a list of a dozen senior staffers--Assistants to the President--who had more important things to do and often little expertise on the particular subject.

This stands in stark contrast to McClellan's assertion that the Bush White House was in constant campaign mode.