You Want Sean Spicer's Job?

If you happen to watch Saturday Night Live, which I don't, you may have seen Melissa McCarthy, the comic actress, portraying Sean Spicer, the president's press secretary.  Now I like Melissa McCarthy in her various roles, so this has zero to do with her and everything to do with Mr. Spicer.

By the way, there are two reasons I don't watch Saturday Night Live, not that you asked.  OK, maybe three.  First, it's on past my bedtime, although it could be DVRed if I were so inclined.  Second, it is far too "New York" for me.  I can't stand New York, which I regard as the epitome of the idea that you have to follow trends, however stupid they might be.  The Emperor's New Clothes, made into a city, as it were.  The "music" on the show shows that in spades.

The third, of course, is that finding humor in SNL is an often frustrating experience.  Melissa McCarthy may make an awfully funny satiric portrayal of Mr. Spicer, but wading through the rest of an hour, or however long it goes, is simply not worth it.  I don't know if their writers are still as coked-up as they were thirty years ago when the humor was squeezed out of the show, but in the rare times I've recorded the show to see what it's like, well, two laughs don't warrant an hour's worth of DVR bytes.

All of which brings us back to Sean Spicer.

I don't know if he is a basically good guy or not, although we've no reason to doubt that he is.  What he is, however, is one amazing person.

I have never served in the Federal Government, let alone the White House.  But I have had a very close friend who did; he was a Cabinet-level appointee (head of a non-Cabinet agency), so he reported to the president, in this case President Bush 43, and his office was right across the street from the White House.

My best girl and I were invited to join him for lunch at the White House back then, and chatting with him over lunch, well, it became quite easy to identify with what it was like being in the very inner circle of the White House.  There was a lot to it.  The work is fairly unforgiving, and there is so much to know just to speak to your own agency, well, knowing the entire operation of the executive branch enough to face the press on a daily basis is just beyond reasonable.

And yet, there is always a press secretary; there is a daily briefing; there are members of the press who have been looking for raw meat since January 20th (after eight years of rolling over and asking Obama's press secretary what his favorite color was).  When the press is that aggressive, you need to know your facts, because you don't know what they're going to ask.  And don't expect to get paid that much.  The salary is $179,700, which sounds like a lot until you figure it by the hour.

We'd very much like to know whether Spicer actually wanted that job in the first place.  Let's suppose he did, or at least was honored to be offered it, enough to accept.

The daily briefing is, of course, on television, and is in the background while I'm working each day.  So I have to tell you, even if I'm not paying rapt attention to it at all times, I see and hear enough to be able to imagine trying to manage that.

I'm not talking about the shouting herd of reporters screaming to be recognized.  I'm talking about the fact that it is almost never acceptable to answer "I'll check with the President and get back to you."  You had better be able to have an answer to 95% of the questions, or you are failing your job, which is essentially to answer everything so (A) the president doesn't have to, and (B) so the press doesn't make up their own answers, not that they would ever do that.

To answer the questions, you have to know everything, especially the issues of the day.  And you have to have practically instant recall.  My wife will occasionally start a conversation with a sentence that could be about any of two dozen contexts.  I over-complicate things to begin with, so I have to wait for a few sentences to figure out what the topic is.  Then I have to figure out what the answer is, once I finally figure out what the question was.

That is what I project onto Sean Spicer.  Now, the press questions are usually fairly pointed -- reporters are good at asking specific questions there, because they have one shot at getting an answer -- so that part is less of an issue.  But the press secretary doesn't have time (or the opportunity) to ask "What are you even talking about?".  He has to answer, promptly, accurately and compellingly, and his job is to present the president's view in the face of an almost entirely antagonistic media who want to nail your president because they didn't vote for him.

That, of course, means that you have to know the president's view on pretty much everything, as expressed since the last press conference.  How, on earth, do you get that when the president is working 20-hour days and you, well, can't.  You are, after all, human, and this president is a very different being from the rest of us.

You do five of those press conferences a week, and then innumerable interviews all day, with all manner of media outlets, doing exactly the same thing you did in the press conferences.  If you only screwed up 25 times during the week, you are reasonably successful.

And then on Saturday night, you get to watch (if you can stay up past eight) Melissa McCarthy portraying you as a wild man, pushing your podium around like a battering ram and satirizing you, knowing full well that in America she has every right to do so and is actually pretty funny doing it.

And you want that job, eh?   I don't.  I don't envy anyone who has it, I respect them greatly.  I can't imagine anyone not burning out in two years, after burning through maybe ten years of life span in those two years.

That's what I was thinking about yesterday as I heard Spicer deal with the whole odd General Flynn story.  You want that job?

More power to you.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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