Tony Snow’s White House Debut

The White House press corps gave Tony Snow rock star treatment for his first televised press briefing today. It was standing room only. I’ve never seen it so packed, not even on my first day last year when Bush was the surprise briefer. Today I arrived a few minutes before the briefing started and managed to squeeze in against one of the side walls up against some extra ladders belonging to a TV crew. Tony came in, flashed a smile at the full house, and said, “I feel so loved.” Raghubir Goyal shouted out, “Welcome to the White House Press Office!” Connie Lawn and Les Kinsolving were swooning with delight. Directly in front of me, five photographers began frenzied shutter-clicking that went on for most of the briefing, although, at one point, one of them decided he’d had enough, and started squeezing his way back past the reporters crammed into the aisle. He body checked a woman standing near me, and as he disappeared into the throng, she looked down and discovered that he’d torn her dress. She wasn’t too happy about it.

There were 22 questions about Bush’s immigration speech, 5 on the NSA phone records story, 1 on Karl Rove, and 0 on ABC’s claim that the FBI is using National Security Letters to obtain phone records of journalists without judicial oversight and without informing the journalists (that was the question I tried to ask).

Tony is much slicker than Scott. He grins and rattles out the words as if really knows what he’s talking about, but he still won’t tell us what we want to know. Here’s a sample exchange:

Q Tony, I’m curious, why won’t you comment at all on the USA Today story, or at least talk in a limited way about how average Americans’ phone records are handled by the National Security Agency?

MR. SNOW: Because it’s inappropriate.

But the highlight of Tony’s performance was near the end, when someone asked him why he was wearing a yellow plastic bracelet. He stood silent for several long moments, apparently fighting back tears, before he explained, with long pauses between phrases:

I had cancer last year…And having cancer, it’s one of these things…thank Terry Hunt for having provided…I lost my old one when I was in the hospital having my last cancer surgery. It’s going to sound stupid, and I’ll be personal here, but…just having gone through this last year…and I said this to Chris Wallace…was the best thing that ever happened to me…It’s my Ed Muskie moment. (Laughter.) I lost a mother to cancer when I was 17, same type — same type, colon cancer. And what has happened in the field of cancer since then is a miracle.

Scott must’ve warned him about me, though, because he called on a couple of reporters standing farther back in my aisle, but didn’t call on me. I’ll try it again tomorrow.

UPDATE: Eric attended yesterday’s briefing and got a question in, which he wrote about here -ed.