Is Snow A Done Deal?
All signs out of the White House appear to be that Tony Snow is a done deal as the next White House press secretary and that it’s only a matter of working out the details. Here’s the relevant section from Mike Allen‘s excellent Time magazine story on the White House reshuffling and Josh Bolten‘s plan for fixing things up:
“5. COURT THE PRESS. Bolten is extremely guarded around reporters, but he knows them and, unlike some of his colleagues, is not scared of them. Administration officials said he believes the White House can work more astutely with journalists to make its case to the public, and he recognizes that the President has paid a price for the inclination of some on his staff to treat them dismissively or high-handedly. His first move, working with counselor Dan Bartlett, was to offer the press secretary job to Tony Snow of Fox News radio and television, a former newspaper editorial writer and onetime host of Fox News Sunday who served George H.W. Bush as speechwriting director. Snow, a father of three and a sax player, is the bona fide outsider that Republican allies have long prescribed for Bushworld and would bring irreverence to a place that hasn’t seen a lot of fun lately. ‘White Houses are weird places,’ he told a 2004 panel on White House speechwriting. Snow had his colon removed after he was found to have cancer last year, but his doctors have approved the possibility of his taking the grueling post.”
Of course, David Gergen has some advice for the potential new flack: “The real question is whether the president wants to change the way information is given to the press. It’s all up to the president. Tony Snow will only be effective if the president himself wants to change the practices and how secretive they are, how non-informative they are,” he said on Reliable Sources yesterday.
