The Talented Mr. McClellan

Today's Washington Post contains a 2,400 word story about Scott McClellan's ability to confound the White House press corps by:

- Saying very little
- Repeating it over and over and over again

Titled "Unanswer Man," the piece contains passages such as the following:

Last Friday reporters battered McClellan over a New York Times report that the president had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without warrants on people in the United States. Over several minutes, McClellan emphasized that:

The president is doing all he can to protect the American people from terrorists (10 times);

The administration is committed to protecting civil liberties and upholding the Constitution (seven times);

Congress has an important oversight role, and the administration is committed to working with it on these difficult matters (five times); and

He would not discuss ongoing intelligence activities (five times).

It was all on live television and in the news conference transcripts, which are posted on the White House Web site and then e-mailed around, deconstructed, blogged about, picked over and scoured throughout a vast electronic briefing space. The words of White House spokesmen have never been so widely or quickly distributed.

Not content merely to critique Scotty's performance at the podium, WaPo reporter Mark Leibovich delves also into the private life of Bush's clamped mouthpiece.

In the course of researching this story, the following Scotty fun facts were extracted:

McClellan's wife, the former Jill Martinez, volunteers part time in the White House. They were married in November 2003, live in Arlington, have no kids, no iPods, two cars, two dogs and three cats -- all of them rescued strays and none of which McClellan has ever kicked.

McClellan, a Methodist, is reading Rick Warren's bestseller, "The Purpose-Driven Life."

He was a varsity tennis player at the University of Texas, often wakes -- at 5 a.m. -- to a BBC radio broadcast, then switches to NPR, then alternates between news radio and country music for the 15-minute commute to work in his Chevy Tahoe.

From the podium, McClellan will often bring up his "close relationship" with the reporters who cover the White House. He keeps talking about the "trust" he's established and how they know each other "very well."

"I think this is an example of Scott talking in code," [NBC White House correspondent David] Gregory says.

And, don't start thinking that McClellan's childhood escapes analysis. Nuh, uh.

[His mother, Carole Keeton] Strayhorn, now the Texas comptroller and a candidate for governor, describes her son as "one of the most focused people on Earth" and tells this story: McClellan once returned home after playing tennis and started telling her about his match when a fuse blew and the house went dark. But he kept talking, on-message, as if nothing had happened. "We were like, 'Uh, Scott, haven't you noticed that every light in the house just went off?' "

Wow, Mark. Angry much?

This is more evidence that the reporters who cover the White House have had it up to here with the administration's obfuscatin' ways. The story spreads itself across five pages of the Post website. It gets more sarcastic with each paragraph. Leibovich even gets other reporters to go on the record with their assessments of McClellan's performance and personality. Apparently, the deference that the press corps used to give him is really and truly gone.

It's gonna be a long three years, Scotty. You might want to shoot a resume over to Ari Fleischer.