Scott McClellan, best known as a bumbling, ineffectual press secretary for President Bush, until he switched sides and wrote a an anti-Bush memoir that made him a press darling, is endorsing Barack Obama. That’s fine. But I can’t help entertaining the thought that, like many attention-getting conservatives who have been very public in jumping ship, it’s more about Scott than Obama.

Suzanne Fields made the same point about The Endorsers in a funny column yesterday:

“Even mere scribblers are getting into the personal endorsement business. Ken Adelman, a magazine writer who was an arms-control maven in the Reagan administration, sounded more miffed with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin than annoyed with Sen. John McCain. Or maybe he just wants a seat on the bus (and to keep his name in print)….

“Boris Johnson, the new mayor of London, offers an endorsement that merely embarrasses the endorser. He finds many reasons for hoping ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ wins, and, curiously, uses the middle name that has become the H-word in polite society here. ‘He seems highly intelligent,’ the mayor wrote in an op-ed in the London Daily Telegraph. ‘He has an air of courtesy and sincerity. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporizing a series of grammatical sentences, each containing a verb.’ This was so over-the-top that Toby Harnden, the Washington correspondent for the Telegraph, felt compelled to apologize for the newspaper.

“’What’s his argument?’ he asked. ‘Boiled down, Boris thinks that Obama is courteous, intelligent, sincere and speaks well. Oh, yes, and he is black. Shades of Joe Biden’s patronizing remark that Obama was ‘the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.’”