Sources: Snow Accepts White House Press Secretary Post

04/25/2006

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Fox News commentator Tony Snow has decided to accept the White House press secretary’s job after top officials assured him that he would be not just a spokesman but an active participant in administration policy debates, people familiar with the discussions said yesterday.

Snow’s appointment could be announced as early as today. The only potential obstacle would be the results of a CAT scan taken Thursday, which he hopes will reveal no recurrence of the cancer that forced him to have his colon surgically removed last year, these sources said.

A director of speechwriting for President George H.W. Bush, Snow views himself as well-positioned to ease the tensions between this White House and the press corps because he understands both politics and journalism, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the appointment has not been announced.

White House officials said they expected an announcement this week but declined to comment publicly on the search to replace outgoing press secretary Scott McClellan.

Snow would be the first Washington pundit—in his case, one who has been an outspoken ideological voice—to take over the pressroom lectern.

“President Bush hates responding to the press, hates responding to political enemies—he thinks it’s beneath him,” Snow said on Fox News in March. “He’s got a stubborn streak.” What the president needed, he said, was “a series of vigorous defenses” of his position.

Brit Hume, Fox’s Washington managing editor, said he was “a little surprised” that Snow would give up his new radio show to take one of the capital’s most demanding jobs.

“I think he’s excited by the idea of being on the inside,” Hume said. “He believes he will be at the table when decisions are made. For someone of his bent, that’s too good to pass up.”

Dee Dee Myers, a spokeswoman for President Bill Clinton, said that if Bush wants smoother relations with journalists, “Tony has stature. He understands how the press works from both sides. He has a big personality, and that can be helpful.” But she noted that Snow has “a long paper trail” and would have to defend policies he has criticized.

McClellan, whose tight-lipped style left him with strained relations with reporters, announced last week that he is stepping down as part of a White House reorganization being spearheaded by the new chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten. If Snow succeeds him, he would be the first career journalist to serve in the position since President Gerald R. Ford tapped Ron Nessen, an NBC correspondent, in 1974.

A senior administration official said last night that Bush is aware of the “perception of disdain for the institution of the media” on the part of the White House and wants a spokesman who will forge “a good working relationship” with journalists. The president also is looking for “a forceful advocate for the type of historical change he’s trying to accomplish. . . . We believe Tony fits the bill in both areas. He has a lot of experience on the air, which with the evolution of the briefings is something you have to take into consideration.”

Snow, 50, is particularly interested in economic and immigration issues. He intends to insist on greater access for White House reporters, said sources familiar with his plans. He has described the press corps as a beast that must be constantly fed. In a December 2000 column in the Washington Times, he referred to “Democrats and journalists (but I repeat myself).”

He has told associates he plans to function as an advocate for reporters, an approach that would run counter to the administration’s previous philosophy about the position.

The question of whether to take the job—which includes a substantial cut from his media earnings, to $161,000—weighed so heavily on Snow that he lost several pounds in a week. His last CAT scan, three months ago, showed him to be cancer-free. His doctors, who refashioned his small intestine to function as a colon, have given him the green light to take the job; one joked that it might give him heartburn but not cancer.

William Kristol, who worked with Snow in the White House of George H.W. Bush and was a regular panelist on “Fox News Sunday” when Snow anchored the show, invoked the Fox News slogan in saying: “It will be good to have a fair and balanced press secretary.

“An outsider with a somewhat happy-go-lucky attitude could help externally, but also internally,” said Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, because staffers tend to get “so defensive after years of getting pummeled.” He said Snow could also carry Bush’s message on the airwaves, adding that “this White House has been amazingly negligent in putting spokesmen out day after day on radio and television.”

A Cincinnati native, the genial Snow has served as a USA Today columnist, editorial page editor of the Washington Times, deputy editorial page editor of the Detroit News and frequent substitute for talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

As a White House staffer in 1991, Snow once tried to get Bush inpersonator Dana Carvey to speak to White House speechwriters so they could better understand the president’s syntax.

At “Fox News Sunday,” which Snow launched in 1996, he tried to balance a neutral moderator’s role with the aggressive conservatism he espoused in his newspaper column. At the 2000 Republican convention, Fox executives reprimanded Snow for speaking to a GOP youth group. They persuaded him to drop the column the next year.

On the program, Snow interviewed candidate George W. Bush in 2000 and, later, such top officials as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Snow was eased out of the job in 2003 in favor of Chris Wallace, and was given a weekend television show and a radio program that is also heard on XM and Sirius satellite radio.

Snow has largely been supportive of the Bush administration, especially concerning its antiterrorism efforts, but has occasionally criticized the president for deviating from conservative goals. In February, he called Bush’s domestic policy “timid” and “listless” and said his abandonment of his Social Security privatization plan was “an act of surrender.”

In December, Snow told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that “the lack of spending discipline on the part of Republicans has been disappointing, and frankly so has George W. Bush’s inability to understand the importance of using a veto.”

Snow has already gotten a taste of the job as a “piñata,” as he put it last week. In his latest column, he wrote that, “Helpful correspondents have told me where to go, what to use to fill various orifices, which pack animal I most closely resemble and my next-world destination.”

Tony Snow

Age: 50 (B. June 1, 1955)

Education: B.A., philosophy, Davidson College; graduate work in philosophy and economics, University of Chicago.

Career: Host, “The Tony Snow Snow,” Fox News Radio; Anchor, “Weekend Live,” Fox News Channel; former anchor, “Fox News Sunday”; syndicated newspaper columnist 1993-2002; speechwriting director and deputy assistant for media affairs for President George H.W. Bush; editorial writing positions at Greensboro Record, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Detroit News, Washington Times.

Family: Wife Jill, one son, two daughters.