The day after Tony Snow’s first on-camera performance as White House press secretary, high-profile commentators are weighing in. In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank calls Snow’s unveiling “a boffo debut.” In the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley deems Snow’s use of the phrase “hug the tar baby,” “a minor snag in an otherwise smooth, polished performance.”
But focusing on those MSM judgments omits the reviews of Snow’s debut from that most crucial of critical demographics: What did bloggers think?
Left-wingers picked a few nits, but the right — perhaps still smarting from too many years of watching Scott McClellan reduced daily to a puddle of sweat — embraced Snow with open arms.
“Tony Snow was awesome yesterday!! I can’t tell you happy I am that he took this job,” writes the Chatterbox Chronicles, adding that Snow’s experiences with cancer give her “even more admiration for him.” Jim Rose says Snow “seems to be holding his own” and “is doing a good job”: “I don’t want to dump on Scott McClellan, he’s a good man who had a hard job, but he always had an air about him that made him seem like a hostage who feared for his life.”
The best news for the White House yesterday, writes Mark A. Kilmer, “was Tony Snow. He dealt with D. Gregory and H. Thomas without breaking a sweat, and he said he is having a blast. He’s the man the president needs in that spot, and he enjoys being there.” Kilmer adds that Snow’s defeat of cancer means “He has the stamina for the long haul.” (Well, two and a half years, at least.)
Meantime, Matt Lewis and the News and the Moderate Voice’s Joe Gandelman both take long analytical looks at Snow and like what they see. “There is a saying that real diplomacy is telling someone to ‘go to hell’ — and having them look forward to the trip! This is a skill that Tony Snow has, and Scott McClellan doesn’t,” Lewis writes. “What Scott McClellan never got is that the real skill in parrying a question is to make the reporter feel that you answered it — or at the very least — that you care. … Conversely, Snow seems to understand this lesson.”
For his part, Gandelman calls Snow “the perfect press secretary for the Oprah/American Idol age.” Whereas “[m]ost recent press secretaries have seemed like machines,” Snow in contrast “comes across as a flesh-and-blood human being.” “The days of the press secretary as a robot-like human tape recorder or a sweaty, hapless human being oozing unease are over,” Gandelman writes. “But therein lies a dilemma: he’s going to have to learn to choose his words quite carefully, because they are pitfalls and he seemingly stepped in one (in a tar pit, that is).”
Indeed, many of the bloggers criticizing Snow seized on his obscure reference, which he later traced back “to American lore.”
While cynically dismissing Snow’s “pre-arranged fake crying,” Toys for Monkies concludes that his “strange” tar baby phrase “was either the dumbest thing ever or another distraction.” “New White House spokesman Tony Snow committed a major gaffe in his latest press conference, responding to a question about domestic spying by saying that he didn’t want to ‘hug the tar baby.’ Oops,” appletree chimes in. “Nevertheless, the New York Times gave his overall performance a rave review. I found the Times piece mind-boggling … there’s such a thing as screwing up so badly that the rest of your performance is irrelevant.”
For those in the dark about what “tar baby” means, Think Progress provides a concise explanation by way of a “memorandum” to Snow — one which had drawn 251 comments the last time we looked.
“Based on the context of the term, we believe you meant tar baby to mean: ‘a situation almost impossible to get out of; a problem virtually unsolvable,'” Think Progress writes. “But in ‘American lore,’ the expression tar baby is also a racial slur ‘used occasionally as a derogatory term for black people.’
“As Random House notes, ‘some people suggest avoiding the use of the term in any context,'” Think Progress concludes. “Now that you are no longer at Fox News, you may want to take them up on their advice.”
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.