for some reason when I was reading this, Jeff Gannon came to mind ...could he have been the WH PR ghost writer afterall???
Words Fail Him
Now that the daily White House briefings are instantly available online, Press Secretary Scott McClellan's mangled sentences, flat-footed evasions, and genial befuddlement have made him the butt of a thousand blogs, as well as of an increasingly savage press corps. Is he a victim, a pawn, or a P.R. disaster?
snip...
How come the White House pressroom doesn't have PowerPoint? Nearly every conference and meeting and middle-school assembly supplies this visual speaking aid and basic technology to lackluster and tongue-tied speakers.
But when I mentioned PowerPoint and other marvels of communication to Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, in a recent interview, he got a cloudy look—as though I had been making an incongruous or impertinent suggestion. As though only a total outsider, or fool, or wise guy would apply such workaday logic to the briefing process.
The briefing room exists, frozen in amber, in another time. The moment is somewhere after Richard Nixon tried to accommodate—and control—the burgeoning press corps by converting F.D.R.'s pool house, sauna, rubdown rooms, and dog kennel into press offices and a small auditorium (it's still, basically, a pool house, with a door that flaps open directly onto the White House lawn, allowing in gusts of hot or cold air). And somewhere well before the advent of personal computers and the digital age (there is no Wi-Fi in the briefing room).
snip...
It's this verbal haplessness that has made Scott McClellan—a pleasant, low-wattage, old-before-his-time young fellow, with, at 38, a wife, no children, and "two dogs and four cats"—the living symbol of this White House's profound and, perhaps, mortal problem with language and meaning. McClellan himself, as though having some terrible social disability, has, standing miserably in the press briefing room every day, become a kick-me archetype. He's Piggy in Lord of the Flies: a living victim, whose reason for being is, apparently, to shoulder public ridicule and pain (or, come to think of it, he's Squealer from Animal Farm). He's the person nobody would ever choose to be.
more...
http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/060404fege01
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