Reading Stephanopoulos, avoiding McClellan (for now)

It's a strange personal coincidence that, today, on the day that former press secretary Scott McClellan's scathing expose of the Bush White House is released, I begin reading George Stephanopoulos's memoir of his years in the Clinton White House, All Too Human. I haven't gotten very far past the prologue, but, based on the book's introduction and several articles that I have recently read about about the work, there are some parallels between it and McClellan's new book.

All Too Human was written soon after the Monica Lewinsky scandal went down, and the tone is one of an advisor who once had great respect for his presidential boss, but who, after a series of shocking public embarrassments, is awakened to the corruption of which he had become a part. It's interesting to ponder whether either of these men would have written the same books had their bosses not become such public pariahs.

In any case, at this point, I'm far more interested in finishing the Stephanopoulos book than I am in picking up the McClellan one. During the Clinton years, the media was, no doubt, awash in talking heads angrily decrying the corruption in the White House, much as we see today with the Bush administration. But now that we've moved past the Clinton years, at least in terms of media coverage, there's some room for perspective, for space to think about the events and personalities that shaped those times, rather than to brain-bounce from one talking point to the next, rapid-fire style, as one tends to do when consuming coverage of any very recent political phenomenon.

As Bush's first term was coming to a close, and the Kerry/Bush battle was in full swing, I was back at my old college, visiting some of my professors, and one particular professor kept me in his office for nearly two hours, presenting me with one printed-off article after another, each decrying the Bush administrations evils. The thing is, he knew that I was already largely onboard to the anti-Bush position, so there was really no practical goal to be gained from showing me these things. He was just really angry about the administration, and he liked expressing that anger and sorting through all the evidence he had to support it. My desire to avoid this sort of fruitless internal re-cycling of my oppositions leaves me disinterested in the new McClellan book. I have read and listened to and watched so many convincing anti-Bush arguments at this point that I don't really see any need to read one more trope on the topic. I'm sure its interesting to hear it straight from an inside source, but I really don't need any more convincing, so the addition of an account by a very qualified source is really uneccessary at this point.

That's why I'm looking forward to reading the Stephanopoulos book, learning more about the mistakes and occasional triumphs of a president whose legacy is far less fresh on my mind than Bush's, and indulging my taste for modern American politics while at the same time escaping the stories that have oversaturated themselves in my mind.