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Flack AttackScott McClellan burns the Bush administration.

By John DickersonPosted Wednesday, May 28, 2008, at 8:07 PM ET

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The volume of defections from the party line—enough to form a choral group!—makes it harder to knock McClellan down. That has not stopped his colleagues, both past and present, from trying. The response has been withering and coordinated. Several made the case that he'd raised no objections while in the White House and that he was not in a position to know about some policies he assailed. "I think his view is limited and some of this may be misunderstanding on his part of what he saw and heard," said former Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend on CNN. Karl Rove compared McClellan to a left-wing blogger. White House spokesperson Dana Perino called McClellan "disgruntled."

McClellan's predecessor, Ari Fleischer, suggested that McClellan had told him privately that the publisher had "tweaked" the book. This passing on of a private conversation, if it happened, is dirty pool and the kind of thing Fleischer would never have countenanced from a reporter. But Fleischer's ghostwritten charge has been picked up by other critics who have all said a version of something like, "It just doesn't sound like Scott." Said one former senior Bush official, "It sounds like his publisher was ticking off a punch list making sure to hit all of the liberal complaints against the administration."

McClellan's publisher, Peter Osnos, denies that a ghostwriter worked over McClellan's draft (though an extra editor, Karl Weber, was brought in to meet the fast publishing deadline). Since McClellan signed off on the work, the point is moot anyway. The other criticisms don't really undermine McClellan's case either. The attacks on his character tend to reinforce the heart of McClellan's account of the CIA leak case—that the White House smears its critics. And even if McClellan was out of the loop on the response to Katrina (it appears lots of people were) and may not have been in on Iraq planning (er, neither was then-Secretary of State Colin Powell very much), that doesn't undermine his central and most damning critique about the administration's utter lack of candor. He describes the administration as one "that, too often, chose in defining moments to employ obfuscation and secrecy rather than honesty and candor." As the press secretary who transmitted the president's message, McClellan has standing to talk about whether the messages he was transmitting and shaping had truth behind them.

It's hard to feel great sympathy for McClellan. If he felt strongly that the president was deceiving the country, or that he had been deceived by Karl Rove, he should have left his job. That's what former press secretary Jerald terHorst did when he disagreed with Ford's pardon of Nixon, a minor offense compared with what McClellan says are the deceptions that led to an unnecessary war. It's also hard to feel bad for the treatment McClellan is getting when he said this about Richard Clarke's tell-all book in 2006: "Why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book."

And yet, I do feel a certain compassion for McClellan after reading a book that is full of regret, soul-searching, and shame. McClellan certainly isn't presenting himself as a hero for finally coming out against policies he once advocated. If he'd left in the middle of the CIA leak scandal, he would have given an enormous gift to the president's political opponents. It would have been the right thing to do. But I can imagine when you're in the thick of political combat, your bosses are keeping you in the dark, and you are constantly being praised for your loyalty, it can be hard to find your way to the right thing. In the end, though, that the author of this book stayed, given his strong views, still seems as puzzling as Bush's claims that he couldn't remember whether he'd once used cocaine.