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Bush Picks Fox Commentator As Chief Spokesman

Posted on: Wednesday, 26 April 2006, 21:00 CDT

WASHINGTON _ The new White House press secretary made his way slowly through the Briefing Room Wednesday, guardedly greeting reporters and fielding a steady stream of sometimes-pointed questions.

Yes, Tony Snow made clear, President Bush wants those around him to "express their opinions."

But no, the longtime conservative commentator added, now that he'll be speaking for Bush, he's not likely to be dumping on him as he has a few times in his columns and on the radio and television for Fox News.

"The president is the guy who runs the place," Snow said. "I'll speak for him _ and at some other point, I'll speak for myself. How's that?"

From any angle, Snow is an intriguing choice to succeed Scott McClellan, who's leaving after nearly three years in a still-evolving White House shakeup, designed to _ at least _ refresh the president's top staff and pull him from the depths of the public opinion polls.

But can the new front man make a difference?

Yes, but undoubtedly only at the margins, said Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary for Bush's father, the 41st president.

Having worked both as a newspaper and broadcast journalist, Snow could be the sort of "broker for the press corps inside the White House" that could prove helpful all around, Fitzwater suggested. And Snow's "unusual stature" as a conservative talk show host _ he has subbed regularly for Rush Limbaugh _ could help him become a "player with the big boys in the Oval Office and the Roosevelt Room."

Snow is no stranger to the White House. He was a speechwriter in the first Bush administration, and his radio and television work have kept him particularly in touch with this administration. Just last month, for instance, he interviewed on his Fox Radio show Vice President Dick Cheney, who had earlier turned to Fox News to explain how he had accidentally shot a hunting companion in Texas.

Over the years, Snow has pushed the conservative Republican Party line, sometimes criticizing Bush for being out of step.

He dismissed the domestic policies outlined in the president's State of the Union address last January as "timid." Two months earlier, he had declared that Bush had lost his conservative "swagger."

"The newly passive George Bush has become something of an embarrassment," Snow wrote.

Mindful of all that _ Snow's remarks were quickly disseminated by the administration's Democratic critics _ Bush sought to dismiss them with a well-placed quip.

"I asked him about those comments, and he said, `You should have heard what I said about the other guy,'" Bush joked.

Quips aside, Snow joins the president when his job approval ratings are at a new ebb, in the low 30s, and the American public is increasingly wary of the war in Iraq and worried about sky-high gasoline prices.

In recent weeks, as some Republican stalwarts worried about this fall's elections have called for change in the White House, Bush has named a new chief of staff, a new budget director and a new press secretary. And more changes are in the works with, perhaps, Treasury Secretary John Snow the next to go.

At the same time, there are few indications that Bush plans any sweeping policy change or major shift in direction. And without those movements, Rutgers University political scientist Ross Baker notes there's not likely to be any profound change at the White House.

"It's really the policy," Baker said. "And policies that presidents are committed to are discarded only with great reluctance _ and most often not at all."

Also, he suggested, that Snow might have a hard time pulling back from the raw doses of opinion in his radio show and columns to the careful speak of a White House press secretary.

He'll now have to be more guarded and "talk with a certain amount of nuance and ambiguity," Baker said. "And that's not Tony Snow."

Or is it?

"You're not coming here to drink the Kool-Aid. You're coming here to serve the president," Snow said during his tour of the Briefing Room. "At this particular juncture, I think what you (the president) want is as much honest counsel as you can get. So when I agree, I'm going to agree. But when I disagree, I disagree."

And on any issue at any time, he said he knows well that the president is the "tie breaker."

By far, the biggest challenge facing the new press secretary is other change at the White House, said Dee Dee Myers, who held the job under President Bill Clinton. What kind of access will Snow have, she wondered, and will he really be in the loop?

"You have to be in some of the meetings," she said. "There were some times when I was, and some times when I wasn't ... Believe me, I know."

Simply put, former top presidential aides readily acknowledge that the White House can be a minefield for any press secretary.

"You've got to learn the players. You need a scorecard," Myers said. "You need to know who's in what camp."

While Bush left no doubt Wednesday in introducing Snow that "my job is to make decisions, and his job is to help explain those decisions to the press corps and the American people," the press secretary's job in these days of 24-hour news is much more complicated than selling soap.

"The White House is a strange place," Fitzwater explained, looking back on his tenure there.

"You have 200 or 300 people, all of whom think they are independent power bases. They all got their job because they know the president or know somebody. And then they all decide whether or not they will deem to tell you what's going on and what they are working on," he said. "Their information is their power. So, the press secretary has to work hard within the White House to stay on top of issues, to know what is going on."

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Source: The Dallas Morning News

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