McClellan’s Credibility Problem?

Howard Kurtz writes this morning that the now-daily sight of Scott McClellan being grilled by the press is causing strong reactions on both the right and the left. He offers his own explanation:

Reporters don’t like being misled. That is the hottest of hot buttons. As the White House gang sees it, McClellan came out 21 months ago and said it was ridiculous to suggest that Rove had outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative and that any staffer found to have done so would no longer being working at 1600 Penn. He said this, by the way, while a criminal investigation was going on. Then Newsweek gets the Cooper e-mail showing that Rove did have a background conversation with him about Plame (or “Wilson’s wife,” as the note put it), and suddenly Scott can’t possibly comment because of the investigation–a position that Bush also took yesterday.

That, to the press, smacks of stonewalling. And if you think such a reaction is unique to the Bush administration, you’ve forgotten about all these tense briefings in which reporters smacked around McCurry and Lockhart as they dueled over various Clinton scandals. The notion that the Clintonites weren’t being straight with the press, I wrote at the time, fueled a lot of the animosity in that briefing room. And now it’s flared up again.

The question we have these days (along with not a few of the reporters we’ve seen at the White House this week) is whether McClellan is digging himself into a hole from which he can’t escape. Given his and the administration’s earlier statements on Rove and the leak investigation, is he between a rock and a hard place?

If Rove is involved, McClellan will have to come out and say either: “Sorry, I misled you” (not a good thing to say to a press corps) or “Sorry, my bosses didn’t trust me with the correct information; they lied to me.” Neither one is a statement that the press corps will easily forgive.

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