Things were not going well for the Bush White House when Tony Snow arrived as the new spokesman in May 2006. The Iraq war was going to hell, the White House was distracted by the ongoing CIA-leak investigation, and George W. Bush’s job-approval rating had fallen to 31 percent in the Gallup poll, the lowest it had ever been up to that point.
On top of all that, the White House did not have an effective spokesman behind the podium in the press room. Scott McClellan was well-connected and loyal — well, that’s the way it seemed at the time — but tended to give rote, repetitive answers when challenged by reporters. The White House simply wasn’t reaching out and engaging the press corps in a productive way during a difficult time. Josh Bolten, newly elevated from the head of the Office of Management and Budget to White House chief of staff, decided to make a change. He got in touch with an old friend, Tony Snow.
“He and I knew each other in the first Bush White House,” Snow recalled in a conversation with me a few days before he started the job as spokesman. “He was doing policy work and I was doing speechwriting. We didn’t keep up with each other, but I gave him a call when he was OMB director and said let’s have lunch. It turned out the day we had lunch was the day he was announced as chief of staff.”
It was a lucky day for Snow, but much more so for the White House. Snow brought obvious gifts as a communicator, plus an impossible-to-dislike personality, and — not to be underestimated — conservative cred.
One often-heard criticism of the White House at the time was that the president didn’t tolerate dissent and wasn’t interested in hearing from anyone who disagreed with him. But in his thousands of hours on radio and television, as well as his syndicated column, Snow had taken a lot of shots at the Bush administration. He had said that the president had “become something of an embarrassment” to Republicans running for office; that he had “lost control of the federal budget and cannot resist the temptation to stop raiding the public fisc;” that he “has a habit of singing from the Political Correctness hymnal;” and that he “has given the impression that [he] is more eager to please than lead, and that political opponents can get their way if they simply dig in their heels and behave like petulant trust-fund brats, demanding money and favor — now!”
The fact that the White House hired Snow suggested two things. One, it could, in fact, tolerate bringing in an outside critic. And two, it really, really needed help. Just yesterday, we got a hint that there were some very highly placed people in the White House who didn’t seem to hold Snow’s statements against him. “I frankly agreed with him on nearly everything, and I’m generally viewed as pretty conservative,” Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News Sunday. “I’m not sure that that’s saying something nice about Tony in some circles, but I always thought of him as a guy who understood very well the purposes of government and that they were limited, and that there were some things government shouldn’t do that we are best able to do for ourselves. And I thought Tony was an effective articulator of that. He was a tough critic of the Bush administration. Before he came onboard as press secretary, he obviously had written some tough criticism of us.”
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