Bush names Tony Snow press secretary [!-- END HEADLINE --] [DIV id=ynmain][!-- BEGIN STORY BODY --] [DIV id=storybody] [DIV class=storyhdr] [SPAN]By Steve Holland[/SPAN][EM class=recenttimedate] 43 minutes ago[/i]
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President George W. Bush named Fox News Radio host Tony Snow as White House press secretary on Wednesday in his latest move to shake up his staff and breathe new life into his presidency.
Snow, 50, is the first Washington pundit to become White House press secretary. In his role as a conservative commentator he has sometimes criticized the president, a point Bush could not resist mentioning in introducing Snow as the replacement for long-time loyalist Scott McClellan.
"He's not afraid to express his own opinions," Bush said with a smile. "He sometimes has disagreed with me, I asked him about those comments and he said, 'You should have heard what I said about the other guy."'
A cancer survivor, Snow is the first journalist to go directly from the media industry to the top spokesman role since Ron Nessen during Gerald Ford's presidency in the 1970s.
He inherits one of the toughest jobs in Washington: Trying to manage the flow of White House information in an era of 24-hour news cycles, and put a fresh face on a White House struggling to fight back from a job approval rating that dropped to 32 percent this week in a CNN poll.
Snow, who starts his job in early May, worked as a speech writer for Bush's father when he was president and has a lengthy resume in print, radio and television journalism.
"One of the reasons I took the job is not only because I believe in the president, because believe it or not I want to work with you," Snow told reporters.
In his role as pundit, Snow has sometimes found fault with Bush's policies, particularly on government spending and even the president's sometimes tortured grammar.
Democrats gleefully circulated by e-mail a sampling of Snow's commentary about Bush in recent years, such as a November 11, 2005, column after Democratic electoral gains in which he wrote that ... "George Bush has become something of an embarrassment."
INSIDER ROLE?
Bush said he liked the perspective Snow brings to the job and a senior White House official said that like McClellan, Snow will have a seat at the table and "was assured that he will be free to participate in policy development and strategic decisions."
Analysts said it was possible that Snow could make the White House more friendly for reporters but that the key will be whether Snow has the insider role he was said to have wanted as a condition for taking the job.
Reporters most of all want a press secretary who is considered a presidential confidant, such as Jody Powell was for Jimmy Carter, and doing that would require a major attitude adjustment by Bush himself, said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar and professor at George Washington University.
"There's no way he can be in the inner, inner circle," said Hess. "He hasn't paid his dues enough for that. He can sit at the table, he can even say things, but he understands that."
Joe Lockhart, a press secretary for Democratic President Bill Clinton, said Bush does not have a messenger problem, he has a message problem, and that Snow faces the challenge of changing the culture of a White House "that prizes secrecy and frowns upon leveling with the American people."
"That culture is dictated by the president and the vice president, and bringing in someone however talented they are -- and Tony is certainly talented -- won't solve the problem," Lockhart said.
Bush's first press secretary, Ari Fleischer, said Snow and other staff changes offer the chance to show Americans that "something new may come from the White House" and that Bush deserves a second look.
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