What Happened, Scott?

                  George W. Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan was one of the weakest in history. Bush loyally transferred McClellan with him from Texas to Washington D.C. when he was elected. But when McClellan  left his position he started pointing fingers at Bush in his instant best-seller, “What Happened.”

                  I understand the idea that McClellan had an ethical responsibility to reveal what happened in the White House, but his timing was all wrong. If McClellan had truly just wanted to reveal what happened behind closed doors, he could have released that information during his time as a press secretary, not after Fox News broadcaster Tony Snow had replaced him. And if that really was the only reason, which I highly doubt, then he would not have released it as a memoir that gained him profit. If McClellan thought that Bush’s campaign relied on “ propaganda” to sell the war in Iraq, was “terribly off course” in war policy, was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing. Then why didn’t he tell Bush that? Why didn’t he show Bush the ways that he could have improved his campaign? And if Bush didn’t listen, then McClellan needed to share that information with the public right then—not years down the road.

         If anything I think McClellan should have remained loyal to Bush. Saying one thing during his position and then turning around and saying the opposite after he was “relieved” of his duties, made McClellan, as well as the Bush administration, look dishonest. There is no more room for dishonesty in public relations. PR is supposed to create transparency, so that we can truly see what public entities are about. Public relations is already receiving a bad rap because of recent scandals in the media. In reality, PR is the opposite of lying; it’s showing the public the truth. But for most, I think the words truth and PR have no relation to one another.

         Either way, McClellan is still being dishonest, but if he remained loyal to Bush at least his future clients would have seen him as loyal. Now how will his clients know that he will not trash talk them in front of the entire nation after he has worked with them. They won’t; and his career in PR will probably suffer from that.