New presidential spokesman far from reserved

updated 6:33 p.m. ET April 26, 2006

WASHINGTON - Tony Snow hasn’t even started his new job as White House press secretary and already he is learning a lot — about himself. He says he’s been called “a BushBot, a puppet, a force of evil in the modern world, a White House mouthpiece-toady-stenographer.” And more.

But the good-natured columnist and Fox News commentator — named Wednesday as Bush’s new spokesman — can give as good as he gets. Although a strong supporter of President Bush, Snow has used his column to label the president “something of an embarrassment,” cast his domestic policy as “listless” and compare him to “the boy who can’t say no” when it comes to federal spending.

The 50-year-old conservative commentator has done an even tougher Snow job on Democrats.

He’s dismissed them as “reduced to a state of unshakable hysteria” and faulted their “righteous ignorance.” He’s labeled Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid “wheezy prophets of the Defeatocrat Party.”

He also has been a strong defender of Bush on many an occasion, applauding his “brilliant” foreign policy, his stick-to-his-guns persistence in Iraq, his “delicious disdain for the Beltway culture,” his “visionary” Social Security plan.

NBC VIDEO New face April 26: President Bush introduces his new press secretary, Tony Snow, to reporters. MSNBC

“On the seminal issues of national security and global destiny, he positively dwarfs the political opposition,” he has written of Bush.

Straying from the minimalist approach
To put it mildly, Snow does not come from the cautious culture of some press secretaries of the past — the ones who make an art form of saying as little as possible.

All of that gives Republicans hope that Snow’s fresh voice — and star quality as a polished media figure — will help reinvigorate the beleaguered White House and jolt it out of a defensive crouch.

“Tony’s sympathetic to the president, obviously, in terms of policy and philosophy, but he’s not a Bush insider and I think that could be healthy,” said William Kristol, who worked with Snow in the first Bush administration and was a regular panelist on Snow’s TV show on Fox News. He describes Snow as “a happy-go-lucky guy” with a relaxed attitude that could do the tightly wound Bush team good.

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