Wow, That Didn't Take Long At All!

Wrong side of the aisle, but otherwise, this was an easy prediction:

While I think Snow is a great choice myself if he does indeed accept the position, expect an endless amount of “Snow Job” headlines from first leftwing bloggers, and eventually the legacy media.

And here’s the first!

Seriously though, assuming all the rumors are true, it’s going to fun–I think–watching Snow sparring with the White House press corps. As a journalist himself, hopefully he’ll know what not to say, which is half the job’s role.

Update: John Hinderaker writes, “It’s Tony Snow!”:

The White House announced tonight that Fox News radio host Tony Snow will be the new White House press secretary, replacing Scott McClellan.

Tony is one of the world’s nice people. He is also a close student of the news, and I think he’s been known to read our site from time to time. His congeniality and media background will buy him some popularity with the reporters who cover the White House. But essentially all of them are partisan Democrats, so that good will will last for about a week. What the White House really needs is someone who can push back aggressively against the liberal tilt of the media, and make the administration’s case directly to the people. Tony Snow is equipped to do this, I think; the question is, will he?

I think he might. Even a few nice, “You don’t really mean that, do you Helen?” sort of jibes of the type that Ari Fleischer was a master at, might be enough to begin to (a) shake up the White House press corps again and (b) make them look even more like highly-partisan fools with a lead pipe tone when they react by sticking their claws into Snow and his classic nice guy Teflon delivery.

Such gestures will also continue, and ideally, accelerate the pattern of The Bush Thesis of legacy media decertification that Jay Rosen first named back in 2004. As Rosen described it, it was a wildly postmodern theory: deliberately turning the rapacious instincts of the press back onto themselves to discredit a hostile liberal media, and provide endless material for conservative pundits and the Blogosphere, all of which–on paper, at least–makes the president look better in the process. (It helps to have coherent, logical policies popular with your base of voters, of course.) And unlike his ineffectual immediate predecessor, Snow seems to be ideally suited to resuming the strategery, increasingly important as mid-term elections loom closer.