It is hard to tell, from rows further back, who is saying what, but I believe that the last question, "It hasn't started," was asked by Edwin Chen of the L.A. Times. Chen has a deep, shiny kindness, serenity and grace about him that suggests decades of meditation. When Chen jumps on the dogpile, it creates a kind of animist earthquake -- a psychic, something-is-deeply-wrong vertigo that one would get if the sun suddenly eclipsed and all the trees on the White House lawn abruptly shuddered all their leaves off.

Mr. Chen was thoughtful and sympathetic after the brief, about McClellan s revelation, that day, that he'd been hurt:

McCLELLAN: It may not look like it, but there's a little bit of flesh that's been taken out of me the past few days.

The official transcript says this statement was followed by laughter, but it was really one of those "Awww" sitcom moments where everyone felt sorry for Scott, for a minute.

Ed Chen's compassionate Buddha nature notwithstanding, I had a hard time sharing his sympathy. It seemed clear that McClellan had ultimately won the day -- there was no new information being circulated, and he had successfully survived another day of the rebellion, which was starting to unravel due to a lack of unity, solidarity and focus. The press had gotten their foot in the door as a team, but Scott was keeping them out one at a time.

I asked USA Today's stylish Richard Benedetto, walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, if he felt in any way demoralized by the day's briefing. Benedetto said, "People get frustrated with Scott because they're looking for a scoop, but you're not going to get a scoop at a White House press briefing. That's not the function of them."

"He said that?" Helen Thomas asked me, later, when I repeated Benedetto's opinion. "Some reporters have better ins -- they can talk to the officials after the briefings and get more, but the credibility in this administration is so low. Those who are getting the so-called exclusives should really find out if they're being used as a ploy or not."

JULY 18, 2005

There's a hierarchy in room that is immediately apparent. The front row players, TV and major wire service reporters, are a discrete breed from the journalists in rows further back, and there is some grumbling and resentment that the network guys, "like a high school in-crowd" as one of the lowlier scribes kvetched, "have a tendency to throw their weight around." The front row swans into the room at the same time as McClellan. At briefing's end, they evaporate and reappear in their docks directly behind the TV cameras, while all lesser journalists shuffle downstairs to file in the creepy little brown catacombs known as The Basement.

After the weekend, there was still a blistering feeling that the Rove story should be pounced on. In a move that seemed to be a painfully obvious ploy to cover Rove's ass, Bush had reneged on his promise to fire anyone involved in the Plame leak. Now the president was saying the culprit would be fired if they were found to have "committed a crime." Since it was far from clear that outing Plame was technically illegal, and given the proliferation of fabulous lawyers in Washington D.C., this was tantamount to saying, "We'll burn the witch if she assumes the form of a sturgeon when we hose her down."

Helen Thomas sits in front because of her seniority, but has less mojo now that she is now a scribe of opinion, rather than a straight news journalist. Still, she plays a mythical function in the room. She is the Great Liminal Crone, custodian of Truth, Warning and Prophecy.

Helen frontally attacked and bludgeoned Scott's hard line. It created a small, energetic jump-start:

THOMAS: What is [the president's] problem? Two years, and he can't call Rove in and find out what the hell is going on? I mean, why is it so difficult to find out the facts? It costs thousands, millions of dollars, two years, it tied up how many lawyers? All he's got to do is call him in.

McCLELLAN: You just heard from the president. He said he doesn't know all the facts. I don't know all the facts.

THOMAS: Why?

McCLELLAN: We want to know what the facts are. Because --

THOMAS: Why doesn't he ask him?

McCLELLAN: I'll tell you why, because there's an investigation that is continuing at this point...

And with that, Ms. Thomas was ignored.

Ed Chen, on July 12, was the first one on the record to ask the sound bite that became a community broadsword the corps passed around and smote Scott with that week.

CHEN: Does the White House have a credibility problem?

I believe it was ABC's Jessica Yellin who picked it up on the 18th. Ms. Yellin has the compact, athletic vibe of the Only Chick on the Men's Water Polo Team, and gets a lot of shots in -- this one, where she reintroduced Ed Chen's Credibility Mallet, not the least of them:

YELLIN: ...Given the fact that you have previously stood at that podium and said [Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff] did not discuss Valerie Plame or a CIA agent's identity in any way, does the White House have a credibility problem?

McCLELLAN: No. You just answered your own question. You said we don't know all the facts. And I would encourage everyone not to prejudge the outcome of the investigation.

The press corps collectively tried to browbeat and coerce McClellan about Rove throughout most of the briefing, but McClellan kept them at bay by invoking the "ongoing investigation." Whenever he brought it up, Scott's little blue eyes took on a sheeny, abandoned quality, as if he had just propped up a set of decoy eyes on toothpicks while his brain retreated eight clicks back into an underground bunker.

Connie Lawn, a conservative reporter for Audio Visual News who has been covering the White House since 1968, maternally intervened when Scott was beginning to look especially bruised.

LAWN: Scott, I just wonder ... on a personal, human note, how are you holding out? Are you enjoying this? [Laughter.] Seriously. And are you consulting with any of your predecessors who have also gone through crises, Mike McCurry --

McCLELLAN: There are so few things I enjoy more. [Laughter.] Connie, this is nothing personal. Everybody is doing their job here, and I respect the job that you all are doing in this room. And I look forward to having a continuing constructive relationship with everybody in this room.

It was a warm exchange, but I watched that thing come out of his mouth -- "There are so few things I enjoy more" -- and it looked like he really meant it. I thought I saw a surge of essential humanity in McClellan, like he was finally plugged in to something besides the chill of the cryonic spin vault -- a microsecond of human honesty. McClellan may whine that he suffers from chunks being taken out of him, but it seemed, in that moment, that he really liked this fight. D.C. is a power and secrecy game, and Scott's imperturbable blind eye to the corps' desire for information is his glory and satisfaction -- proof that underneath the serene whipping-boy routine, Daddy knows he wears the biggest pants in the room and gets to drive the car.

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