The Breath of Fresh Air at the Bush White House

How Tony Snow made things better.

By Byron York
National Review Online

Things were not going well for the Bush White House when Tony Snow arrived as the new spokesman in May 2006. The Iraq war was going to hell, the White House was distracted by the ongoing CIA-leak investigation, and George W. Bush’s job-approval rating had fallen to 31 percent in the Gallup poll, the lowest it had ever been up to that point.

On top of all that, the White House did not have an effective spokesman behind the podium in the press room. Scott McClellan was well-connected and loyal — well, that’s the way it seemed at the time — but tended to give rote, repetitive answers when challenged by reporters. The White House simply wasn’t reaching out and engaging the press corps in a productive way during a difficult time. Josh Bolten, newly elevated from the head of the Office of Management and Budget to White House chief of staff, decided to make a change. He got in touch with an old friend, Tony Snow.

“He and I knew each other in the first Bush White House,” Snow recalled in a conversation with me a few days before he started the job as spokesman. “He was doing policy work and I was doing speechwriting. We didn’t keep up with each other, but I gave him a call when he was OMB director and said let’s have lunch. It turned out the day we had lunch was the day he was announced as chief of staff.”