The Snow Show

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On the morning after the North Koreans tested a nuclear device, White House press secretary Tony Snow held one of the informal off-camera "gaggles" that's meant to give reporters some sense of what the Administration's take is on the stories of the day. One reporter began to ask, somewhat playfully, "It seems there's this massive event; now we're waiting for something to happen--" Snow interrupted. "A massive event?" The reporter clarified. "I mean, a big-deal event, that they tested a nuclear--"Snow interrupted again. "A big-deal event?" Surprised, the reporter asked, "It's not?" Said Snow: "There was an event."

It's the kind of exchange that could have made headlines--WHITE HOUSE DISMISSES NUCLEAR TEST AS NO BIG DEAL--but it didn't. The New York Times referenced the exchange in a longer piece about North Korea, but other than that, the pronouncement went unnoticed. I later asked another reporter why. "Well," the reporter explained, "we've come to understand that when he says stuff like that, he's not representing the White House viewpoint, he's just ... Tony being Tony."

Snow regularly finds himself at the outer edge of Bush country, his rhetoric having carried him past the safety of White House talking points. It is lonely out there. This Administration prides itself on message discipline; straying of any kind is usually punished: Adviser Larry Lindsey was fired in 2002 after telling papers that the Iraq war could cost $200 billion; Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was publicly chastised for not backing up White House estimates on troop levels. But Snow's ad-libbing is tolerated, even encouraged. How does he pull it off? It's not just that he is as quick to retract and apologize as he is to--as he has said--"step in it." It's also because the Snow Show, Administration officials believe, is paying off. "He's not the sort of person who's going to be carefully scripted," says chief of staff Joshua Bolten, "but it's a very small price to pay for having someone who is brilliant at capturing and articulating the essence of the policy message." Or at least, getting that message out. White House counselor Dan Bartlett says he has noticed a marked uptick in how much of the press secretary's briefing gets replayed on the nightly news and throughout cable since Snow took the job in April. "If he's not being quoted," says Bartlett, "then usually one of our critics are, so we'd prefer it be him."