Tony Snow and the right's media machine

By most accounts Tony Snow is an upbeat, can-do sort of guy. He'll need to be as he steps into the position of White House press secretary, at a time when, as a local columnist writes, the administration is desperate to "turn around approval ratings that now are just above chicken pox."Snow got his start in the media in North Carolina, and a piece in a Raleigh News & Observer today is peppered with quotes about him being "classy," "generous," and "good-natured." There was this interesting reference to his politics: Giles Lambertson, associate editor of the Wilson Daily Times, was editorial page editor of the Greensboro Record when Snow was writing editorials in 1979. "I'm a pretty conservative guy, but he was kind of like the William F. Buckley doctrinaire approach," Lambertson said. "He was pretty faithful to that, and he stayed pretty faithful through the years."Believe me, when a writer for the Wilson Daily Times is saying your conservatism is "doctrinaire," that's saying something.The most interesting revelation I've seen about Snow -- besides his bizarre attack on Kwanzaa which appeared on a racist website -- is about his key role in launching the attacks on President Clinton in the 1990s, bringing allegations by Linda Tripp to a national audience: Snow, who worked as a speechwriter for President Bush's father in the early 1990s, introduced White House whistle-blower Linda Tripp to literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who later helped Tripp tease out Monica Lewinsky's detailed description of her affair with Bill Clinton. In summer 1996, Snow reached out to Goldberg, a longtime friend, after Tripp called him for help writing a tell-all book about Clinton."Tony called and said, 'Do me a favor, talk to a friend of mine who wants to write a book about the White House,'" Goldberg said Friday from her Manhattan apartment. [...] In 1998, after the Lewinsky scandal broke, Snow used his syndicated newspaper columns to praise Tripp's patriotism, denounce Clinton as a "cur" and "liar" and publicize Tripp's claims that Clinton spies were combing her garbage to justify a tax audit.The scandal isn't that Snow was picked to be White House press secretary, but that he was ever considered a legitimate journalist.UPDATE: Pam Spaulding looks at Snow's record as an expert on race issues ...