Regarding the calumnious new memoir by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, which accuses the Bush administration of repeatedly misleading the public about the war, my colleague Jonah Goldberg announced: “I have not read the book. I will once I finish eating the contents of my sock drawer (which ranks slightly higher on my to-do list).”

I don’t know what it says about my particular priorities that I actually had a copy of McClellan’s What Happened sitting on my desk at the time I read Jonah’s thoughts. I guess it falls to me to confirm not only that shoving forkfuls of argyle-patterned cotton twill into your mouth is preferable to reading McClellan’s book, but also that the book makes one wish someone had shoved a sock in McClellan’s mouth long ago.

And having read the book, I have to hand it to McClellan. In a genre as routinely and justly derided as the Washington memoir, it takes a special talent to produce a specimen that even by those standards is this flaming-dirigible bad.

It’s usually the sign of a weak reviewer that he feels the need to extrapolate some sort of psychoanalysis from the text, but in McClellan case it’s unavoidable. In fact, once I began reading McClellan’s book, I had to seek outside counsel to confirm my suspicions about his precarious mental state. Political consultant Mary Matalin — no stranger to the Bush White House — put it to me this way: “It’s like Scott’s going through some bizarre self-actualization process. He went on a spiritual journey and ended up in Hades.”

Because there’s no other way to explain bizarre insights like the one here, barely three pages into the introduction:

Writing [the book] wasn’t easy. . . . The quest for truth has been a struggle for me, but a rewarding one. I don’t claim a monopoly on the truth. But after wrestling with my experiences over the past several months, I’ve come much closer to my truth than ever before. [Emphasis original]

My truth? In a book purporting to tell us What Happened, that kind of relativistic nonsense doesn’t exactly build the reader’s confidence. In fact, it’s outright cowardly. Former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey notably employed the exact same weasel words in resigning from office: “My truth is that I am a gay American.” (Well, the truth was that McGreevey was an adulterer who put his boyfriend on the public payroll to the tune of six figures a year.)

Well, in this case my truth as a reader is that it’s pretty clear that McClellan isn’t sure of what exactly happened to himself during his ill-fated tenure as White House press secretary, and certainly doesn’t have a firm enough grasp on what anyone else in the administration did to allege nefarious shenanigans. Two pages into the book McClellan relates his version of the press conference in which he denied Karl Rove and Scooter Libby’s involvement in leaking Valerie Plame’s CIA status:

I’d chosen my words carefully. While I believed what I’d been told by Rove and Libby, I could never know with 100 percent certainty that it was true. So I purposely put the onus on them, noting they had “assured me” about their lack of involvement. It was a firewall of sorts, designed to protect my own credibility if the truth turned out to be more complicated–or wholly different–from what I’d been told.

Fast forward to later on the very same page:

When the truth finally began to emerge, my credibility as a White House spokesman was badly tarnished–a terribly painful experience for me.
I blame myself. I allowed myself to be deceived. But the behavior of the president and his key advisers was even more disappointing.

Now which is it? Was McClellan savvy and untrusting enough to build a firewall to “protect my own credibility” or someone who “allowed myself to be deceived”? The book careens back and forth between either explicitly assigning blame to others in the administration for various wrongdoings or adopting a posture of faux-humility about McClellan’s own complicity. The catch is that McClellan rarely if ever clearly defines what he did that was wrong, except being a cog in the machine.

It’s a sloppy bit of prestidigitation and the effect is obvious — McClellan seeks at every turn to make himself seem to be more of a player and newsmaker than he actually was, particularly since McClellan has little to reveal in the way of new and behind-the-scenes information. At the end of the first chapter, which reads like his literary agent forced him at gunpoint to down a bottle of tequila and then summarize the Wikipedia article on the Valerie Plame affair as uncritically as possible, McClellan concludes:

While politics had been a focus of my life for as long as I could remember, I never imagined one day being cast as a prominent supporting actor in such a widely watched — and historically significant — drama.

Forget for a second that the oxymoronic phrase “prominent supporting actor” neatly sums up the contradictions inherent here. Among the notable players of the Plame scandal — Wilson, Novak, Libby, Rove, Cheney, Fitzgerald, Miller et al. — did anyone see McClellan as anything other than a White House turnspit with delusions of adequacy who happened into the wrong job at the wrong time, and otherwise had little to do with driving the story? We’re talking bit player, not “prominent supporting actor.”

Which brings us to perhaps the most cringe-inducing aspect of the book. For a guy who claims “politics had been a focus of my life for as long as I could remember,” he expresses such wide-eyed wonder at the unsavory aspects of politics it’s a mystery he ever got into the White House. Weirdly, he treats his other “prominent supporting role” in working for Bush — his involvement in the contentious 2000 Florida recount — as a partisan pillow fight. It wasn’t until he became White House press secretary that the light went off and McClellan realized that “too many politicians and their followers have become passionately committed to a preconceived partisan view of reality.” McClellan was, he writes, a mere babe in the woods:

Having accepted the post of White House press secretary at age thirty-five and possessing scant experience of the Washington power game, I didn’t fully understand what I was getting into.

And he still doesn’t. Thus the book is choc-a-bloc full of astonishment over our debased and pugilistically partisan political culture and McClellan’s thoughts about addressing the problem. Unfortunately, getting McClellan to sit down and write a book contemplating the meaning of our contentious political culture is a bit like asking a Golden Retriever to perform a card trick: Sure, he’s eager to please, but ultimately his faculties are limited.

That doesn’t stop McClellan from freely tossing out trite pearls, including a final chapter wherein he suggests restructuring the White House staff so that, among other things, there’s a dedicated position to ensure that “messages the administration chooses to deliver reflect respect for the leaders of the other party and for the legitimate concerns and needs of all Americans.” The new job title will be Special Assistant for the Obvious.

Speaking of obvious, McClellan is obdurately unaware throughout that releasing his memoir during a heated political campaign and while Bush is still in office will largely contribute to the political atmosphere he takes great pains to decry.

The ironic thing is that McClellan’s book, in spite of itself, achieves its ultimate goal as an indictment of the Bush administration: It inadvertently reveals the workings of a mind so wanting that somebody should probably be held accountable for having put McClellan in a position of responsibility in the White House to begin with. And certainly the administration is not known for its deft touch with personnel appointments (see Alberto Gonzales, Michael Brown, Harriet Miers, and so forth).

Otherwise, the book is a spectacular failure on just about every level, and one need not disagree with McClellan’s assessment or like President Bush to reach that conclusion. Contrary to McClellan’s claim that partisanship taints everything in Washington, even former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe has slammed his book. After muddling through 323 pages, any honest reader will note that McClellan proves so inconsistent, self-aggrandizing, and generally dense that no one, least of all the author, can be reliably sure of What Happened.

– Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.