From Salon
By Louis Bayard

Is it possible to feel sorry for Scott McClellan?

Not if you’re one of the pundits who’ve been piling on his carcass since the release of his memoir, “What Happened.” From the left, he’s been scorned for suppressing his qualms about the Bush administration until a publisher was willing to pay for them. From the right, he’s been flayed for betraying the people he formerly served as mouthpiece.

Yes, there is rude justice in seeing McClellan ground up by the same White House attack machinery that he himself stoked all those years. And yes, there are ample reasons to doubt the purity of his motives. (His suggestion that he’s only trying to depolarize our political climate is particularly disingenuous.) All the same, as one who once plied McClellan’s trade, albeit at a much lower level, I prefer to take a more charitable view of his belated truth-telling. I see a man trying to disentwine his soul from his job.

Which is a particularly hard thing to do when you have, or, I should say, had, a job like McClellan’s. A job that has only a notional link to reality, that requires you to say night is day and to stifle every uprising of self-doubt. A job that forces you, in effect, to have two selves — public and private — while making it virtually impossible to reconcile them.

Indeed, if you talk to Washington flacks, no matter their political stripe, you’re more likely to hear a measure of empathy for McClellan. If you ask them why McClellan didn’t speak up earlier, the answer will be: He was a press secretary, not an ombudsman. If you ask them why he didn’t resign, they’ll tell you that a good flack, like a good soldier, follows orders. The cause is what matters, not the individual’s pangs of conscience. And if you ask them how McClellan could turn around years later and betray his employer’s confidences … well, the more thoughtful ones might concede that betrayal, one way or another, is written into the job description.

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