As I mentioned last week, Matt Latimer, a former Bush Administration speechwriter, has written a book. Given his recent Washington Post op-ed, in which he hyperventilated about firing presidential speechwriters and took a crack at Karl Rove, I assumed the book’s thesis would annoy me. Turns out I was right.
An excerpt appears in October’s GQ and that should tell us all we need to know. As a former Bush staffer, you know what you’re getting when you sell your soul memoirs to GQ. And GQ fulfills its bargain by building up Matt’s profile – there at the surge, center of the economic meltdown, provider of definitive proof that “Dubya” is a moron.
Here’s the headline and tease:
ME TALK PRESIDENTIAL ONE DAY: Matt Latimer worked as one of Dubya’s speechwriters during the president’s final twenty-two months in office. He was there to help sell the surge to a skeptical public. He was there as we pretended that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. And he was there to see a president who failed to grasp his own $700 billion bailout package – even as he was pitching it to the American public on live TV. A disillusioned insider reveals for the first time just how messy things got.
“Mid-level staffer trashes former colleagues” doesn’t have the same ring.
The most unfortunate part of what follows is that Latimer lassos in two other former speechwriters – Chris Michel and Jonathan Horn – whom I know to be two of the most dedicated and egoless staffers around. He owes them an apology for connecting them in any way to this drivel.
If you want a memoir to sell, it’s got to have some inside dirt – this purports to, though the veracity of it will be forever impossible to confirm. It should also be well-written. This isn’t. Almost weirdly so. Based on the excerpt, it’s at turns juvenile, hackneyed, and unintentionally honest about how little Latimer actually knows.
But I’ll let him speak for himself.
Right at the start we get a bit of sophomoric humor (the president’s nickname for Jonathan Horn was “Horny”) and one of the most warmed-over clichés about the Bush Administration: “[Chris Michel] was usually chipper, though at the moment his face was so pale he must have been the whitest man in the Bush White House. And that was no small accomplishment.”
Yowza! Republicans are white and out of touch. That’s fresh.
But wait, there’s more in that vein. Describing a previous job on Capitol Hill, Latimer writes: “I was assigned to coach Republican senators on how to reach out to the media and entertainment world. (You try explaining The View to a group of 65-year-old white Republican men.)”
Hah – ‘cause they’re white and men and old – they probably smell like Ben-Gay. And they’re clueless. White men are incapable of understanding four women who sit around a table and talk to each other on TV.
How could a hipster like Latimer possibly have muddled through?
Latimer goes on to easily dispose of people who worked alongside him: “At the Pentagon, as chief speechwriter to Donald Rumsfeld, I battled an entrenched civil-service system and an inept communications team.”
If only we’d had a little more Matt Latimer in the PR strategy, the New York Times would be writing encomiums to the Iraq War.
But getting to the White House offered no respite from the stupidity: “[I]t was not at all what I envisioned. It was less like Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing and more like The Office.”
As a fan of both shows, I’d say Matt displays neither the loyalty of Michael Scott nor the inner-sanctum meta-understanding of the president qua president exhibited by Sam Seaborn.
Latimer gets into the meat of his argument when discussing the White House communications scramble around last fall’s financial bailout plan. He aims to give us the inside dope by saying, “Pundits on TV started asking why the president wasn’t saying more and what he was going to do. The answers were: We had nothing to say and no one had any idea.”
Yet he then spends the next few pages discussing what they said and what they were planning to do.
In Latimer’s telling – surely catnip to the editors of GQ and other dyspeptic liberals who just can’t quit George Bush – the president was clueless on his own policy:
[T]he president was clearly confused about how the government would buy these securities. He repeated his belief that the government was going to “buy low and sell high,” and he still didn’t understand why we hadn’t put that into the speech like he’d asked us to. When it was explained to him that his concept of the bailout proposal wasn’t correct, the president was momentarily speechless. He threw up his hands in frustration.
In the end the president turned out to be more correct than not, as taxpayers have reaped billions from investments made in banks that were recouped on the high side.
At the time, though, confusion reigned. Fortunately Latimer was there to sniff out the truth: “There were reports that only four [House] Republicans out of nearly 200 supported the plan. From what I was starting to glean about the whole scatterbrained operation, four seemed like too many.”
But the villain, it turns out, was not the president, but Secretary Paulson, a man Latimer first describes as having “a scratchy voice that sounded like he had a thousand-dollar bill stuffed in his throat” – get it, because he’s rich. Later, in a ballsy bit of pot-calling-the-kettle-black, Latimer says Paulson had been “pretty much a nonperson at the White House.”
Latimer sees through the nonperson. “It wasn’t that the president didn’t understand what his administration wanted to do,” he writes, “It was that the treasury secretary didn’t seem to know, changed his mind, had misled the president, or some combination of the three.”
It could also be – and I’m just spit-balling here – that the exigencies of the most dramatic financial crisis in 80 years and a Congress that was full of cats that didn’t want to be herded required a little on-the-fly revision by policymakers. Those conversations, though, were above Latimer’s pay grade, which any speechwriter not wrapped up in his own ego would freely admit.
But Latimer’s got plenty of ego. Describing a conversation between the president and his speechwriters as they prepared to announce the bailout strategy, Matt conveys his own anger at the president’s apparent desperation: “‘This is the last bullet we have,’ the president said at one point, referring to the bailout. ‘If this doesn’t work…’ He shook his head, and his voice trailed off. That wasn’t good enough for me. If this doesn’t work, then what? We’re done? America is over? I looked around at everyone else. What does that mean?”
“That wasn’t good enough for me.” That made me laugh. Matt’s getting mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore! He’s not actually going to ask for clarification, mind you, but he’s going to scurry back to his desk and write down how gosh-darned angry he is for his best-selling tell-all memoir that will be excerpted in GQ, where cool and good-looking people will read it and then maybe The Daily Show will call and …
Sorry, where were we? Oh, right. Latimer gives us his insider’s view of the world. “In the weeks that followed, Paulson changed his spending priorities two or three times. Incredibly, he’d been given the power to do with that money virtually anything he pleased. All thanks to a president who didn’t understand his proposal and a Congress that didn’t stop to think.”
Deep, man. Deep.
Latimer comes close to saying something interesting with the following nugget, wrapped in a healthy dose of self-regard:
The proposal the president announced to the nation that night would be soundly rejected by the House of Representatives. An eventual compromise was reached a week later. And to help get it passed, I had to endure what I considered the biggest indignity of my entire White House tenure: We were now writing remarks for Jimmy Carter, of all people, because we’d been abandoned by nearly everyone else.
Apparently Jimmy Carter was going to say something about the need for action on the economy and the Bush Administration speechwriters sent him a text. Yet the point of the paragraph isn’t the historically interesting anecdote, but rather the insult to Latimer’s pride. This is beginning to read like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
If only it were as funny. When White House Counselor Ed Gillespie was seeking a name for the financial bailout legislation (a perfectly reasonable and even necessary question that Latimer derides with the bitchy observation, “Yes, a catchphrase would solve everything”), Latimer writes, “I suggested that we also apologize to the former Soviet Union and retroactively concede the Cold War.”
And the chess club roared.
Latimer also gives us reason to question his political astuteness. “Me? I figured there was no way in hell any Republican would vote for [John McCain].”
Really? John McCain was the Republican candidate for president running against the most liberal Democrat nominated in a quarter-century, and Matt didn’t think any Republicans could bring themselves to vote for McCain? Where did he think we’d all go?
As it turns out, his fellow Republicans in the White House could have exposed the flaw in his reasoning.
After relating the president’s observation that Sarah Palin would face a tough introduction to the campaign trail because she was thrown onto the national stage so quickly, Latimer points out how politically ignorant everyone else was: “It was a rare dose of reality in a White House that liked to believe every decision was great, every Republican was a genius, and McCain was the hope of the world because, well, because he chose to be a member of our party.”
It’s true, we did. But how could Latimer be surrounded by these people and still think no Republican would vote for McCain?
But I shouldn’t be so hard on Latimer. Even President Bush agreed with him on the 2008 race: “The president, like me, didn’t seem to be in love with any of the available options.”
The president was just like Matt.
This reminds me of the line Latimer wrote in his Washington Post op-ed: “Deserved or not, my name can at least be placed in the same sentence with those notable presidential scribes whose talents have enlivened our national story: Sorensen, Safire, Shrum, Dolan, Noonan.” A truism he proved by … putting his name in the same sentence with those notable presidential scribes.
Latimer does serve up one anecdote that will be repeated by people on the left and the right, because everyone likes a good Joe Biden joke. Describing an Oval Office meeting at which President Bush was holding court, Latimer tells us, “He paused for a minute. I could see him thinking maybe he shouldn’t say it, but he couldn’t resist. ‘If bullshit was currency,’ he said straight-faced, ‘Joe Biden would be a billionaire.’”
Latimer can leverage just enough stories like this, stories that pass the smell test, to make people believe that much of what he describes actually happened just the way he describes it.
But ultimately the issue is not whether Latimer’s tale is fact or fiction. The issue is trust. It’s one thing to offer analysis of – or even a humorous take on – the Administration you worked for. It’s another thing to deliberately attempt to make your former colleagues and bosses look bad – and to use your access to decision-makers to do it.
The White House is not like the television West Wing. Life isn’t scripted. People don’t act along character arcs. Staffers in high pressure situations often get stressed and weird and need to be able to think and talk through any number of frustrations and political hurdles and policy options before settling on what gets presented to the public. To be effective in that environment, you should be confident that what you do and say won’t be exploited by a climber trying to pimp a book.
In writing this little tome, Latimer breaks his trust with the people who gave him the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream and discredits his erstwhile profession.
I don’t know Matt Latimer (our White House stints didn’t overlap), but I assume he doesn’t want to work as a speechwriter again. I can’t imagine anyone – Republican or Democrat, politician or corporate leader – would hire him. Who could trust him?
Perhaps his future lies as an author in another medium. But he should remember that you only get one flicker of stardom from burning your bridges. GQ won’t always salivate over his gossipy prose.
