McClellan on 'propaganda campaign'

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan admitted Sunday that he got caught up in the very Beltway culture of spin and obfuscation he blasts in his new book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.”

“One of my biggest mistakes I think, and I blame myself for this, was I put myself in the position of unknowingly passing along false information,” McClellan told Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” 

“I was part of this propaganda campaign, absolutely,” McClellan said while discussing the run-up to the Iraq war.

The acknowledgement came after Russert spent much of the show’s first half airing examples of situations McClellan defended, or was silent on, which he would later criticize in his scathing memoir. Toward the end of the interview, Russert asked the former Bush spokesman what he had learned.

“The most important lesson is that it’s important to speak up at the time and I was young and I probably should have spoken up about some of these issues sooner,” he said.

Continuing the publicity tour for his book — to be officially released on Monday — McClellan said the nation was pulled into the Iraq war by a White House with a “permanent campaign mentality” that “wasn’t as open and forthright as it could be.”

“When you go to war, you have to build bipartisan support and then you have to sustain it. We couldn’t sustain it because we were not open at the beginning and the president could not go back and admit some of the mistakes that were made early in the build up to the war,” he said. “I think that that hurts our troops the most, because they deserve as much bipartisan support as we can get here in Washington D.C. and the president failed to do that.”

He said he intends to donate some of the profits from the book to the families of the troops who were injured or killed in the Iraq war.

The other hot topic on the Sunday shows was Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s future in the presidential race. Saturday’s decision by the Democratic National Committee to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations at half strength left rival Sen. Barack Obama 66 delegates shy of clinching the 2,118 delegates needed for the nomination.

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson argued that the race isn’t over and used an explanation that will likely echo for the next few days.

“We’re going to continue to make the argument to superdelegates; we’re going to argue we won the popular vote. More people have voted for Sen. Clinton than Sen. Obama. More people have voted for Sen. Clinton in these primaries than anyone in the history of primaries. That’s an important metric that superdelegates ought to be looking at,” Wolfson told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”

He went on to make the familiar argument that Clinton has done better in crucial swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia and is a stronger general election candidate against Republican Sen. John McCain.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said on ABC’s “This Week” that he thinks Obama will lead in the popular vote after the primary season concludes Tuesday.

“Most importantly, and even as the Clinton campaign has said on numerous occasions, the nomination is decided by the number of delegates that you have and I think the winner of the majority of those delegates will soon be Sen. Obama,” Gibbs said.

On “Meet the Press,” former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) told Russert that he is confident that after Tuesday’s primary Obama will collect endorsements from the vast majority of remaining uncommitted superdelegates.

“I think we’re going to have a nominee before the end of this week,” Daschle said.

Clinton supporters making the rounds on the Sunday shows refused to directly answer questions about whether the New York senator will drop out of the race if Obama collects 2,118 delegates — saying instead that they expect Clinton to be the nominee.