He’s now far from the D.C. spotlight

SAN FRANCISCO -- On his book-promotion stopover here, former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was squired around by a “literary escort,” a pleasant woman named Naomi who drives visiting authors to their speaking engagements in a blue convertible. There were no motorcades, no street closures, no Secret Service.

McClellan slept at a Marriott Hotel, a couple of notches down from the Beverly Wilshire, where he, President Bush and the rest of the White House entourage stayed when in Southern California.

Where he once spoke with the mighty White House seal behind him, McClellan addressed a crowd here in front of a humble fabric backdrop emblazoned with the words “Commonwealth Club.”

It is a long way from the Oval Office, where McClellan once basked in the confidence of the president, to the book circuit, where he is delivering a sharp critique of that president.

But nearly a month after the explosive book’s release, McClellan seems comfortable in his new role, polishing his one-liners about Dick Cheney, relishing largely sympathetic audiences and accepting his exile from certain ex-colleagues.

“There are a number of former colleagues that, they were friends before and they’re friends today and will continue to be,” McClellan said in an interview last week. “I hope someday that others can step back from this and I can maybe renew some of those friendships. I don’t know if that’ll happen or not.”

From the lectern, McClellan is looser and funnier than he was in the hot glare of the White House press room.

It probably helps that his book tour has taken him to such “blue” cities as Santa Monica and Austin, Texas. In Seattle, a sold-out crowd of 850 gave him a standing ovation. In San Francisco, a liberal city Bush has never visited as president, McClellan was drowned out by applause as he said, “The war in Iraq was not absolutely necessary.”

McClellan has incorporated some crowd-pleasing titles of books he imagines his former White House comrades writing:

“The Lies I Told, to Whom and Why,” by Karl Rove.

“Well, Paaaaaardon Me!” by Scooter Libby.

The jokes loosen up a crowd of 550 San Franciscans in the middle of a workday -- and appear to crack McClellan himself up. Then he moves into the serious part of what has become his “stump speech,” an overview of the book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.”

The book accuses Bush of orchestrating a “political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people,” trying to make the “WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were.”

Reading at times from prepared notes, McClellan acknowledges, as he does in the book, that he was swept away by trust for the president and the intelligence he assumed top national-security aides must have had.

After reflecting for many months after leaving the White House, “I realized how badly misplaced my trust was,” McClellan said.

“This is the truth as best I know it from my perspective,” he told the audience here.

McClellan is a little fuzzy on certain questions about his future. Whom will he vote for, John McCain or Barack Obama? Not sure yet. Will he change parties, as he has done once before? Hasn’t made up his mind.

How will he make a living, now that the president of the United States and so many other influential Republicans consider him a traitor?

He wants to change Washington’s culture, and believes, based on the reception he says his book is getting, that the public hungers for that too.

Beyond that, he says he not sure about work, though he’s considering academia.