As for the Democrats, Barack Obama's presidential campaign quickly found material that fit its message, citing McClellan's report as yet another reason to ask: "Do we continue George Bush's failed policy in Iraq or do we change it?"
So just what was it about this end-of-an-administration tell-all that turned it into an instant topic for a TV talkathon?
"It is the drama of somebody who owed everything to the Bush administration in terms of his visibility and status in Washington" turning on his master, said Linda L. Fowler, a professor of government at Dartmouth College. "It is more about the political drama of the Bush White House slowly self-destructing" than about the policies of that White House.
Dana Perino, Bush's current press secretary, offered a part-starchy, part-sympathetic appraisal. In a statement delivered to reporters in Colorado, where the president was about to speak at the U.S. Air Force Academy commencement, she said: "Scott, we know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House.
"For those of us who fully supported him before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad -- this is not the Scott we knew," she said.
Later, she said Bush was "puzzled" by McClellan's account. "He doesn't recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years," Perino said, adding that Bush was "disappointed that, if he had these concerns and these thoughts, he never came to him or anyone else on the staff that we know of."
"It's just a sad situation," she said.
The White House had no official comment on the allegations themselves.
As for the man at the center of the storm -- the 40-year-old, moon-faced, tennis-playing, Diet Coke-drinking McClellan -- there was silence when confronted by a TV crew in his suburban Virginia neighborhood: He was under contract, he explained, to deliver exclusive comments today on a morning TV show.
That may have given at least one blogger on the conservative website www.hotair.com an "I-told-you-so" moment. "What's the point, except to cash out?" the blog poster said. Financial details on the book are not known.
In a broad indictment of the culture of Washington and national politics, McClellan said deception "permeates our national political discourse" and has "become an accepted way of winning the partisan wars for public opinion."
