Tony Snow has passed away. I didn't watch him as much as I did Tim Russert, so his passing doesn't have as great of an impact on me. But it's still sad.
I first saw Tony Snow on Crossfire, where he was on the right (of course). He didn't make that much of an impression on me in terms of his arguments, but his name caught my attention: Tony Snow. And he looked as white as snow. The next time I saw him was when I was at Harvard during the 2000 Presidential election, and, for some reason, the law school commons had on Fox News. And there was Tony. I remembered him from Crossfire.
The next time I saw him was when I got my monthly edition of Imprimis, a publication put out by the conservative Hillsdale College. "Wow! He must be a conservative, to be in this," I thought. On Crossfire, he wasn't exactly an attack dog like Pat Buchanan and John Sununu, so I guess I considered him rather milquetoast.
But I got to appreciate Snow a lot more when I saw him on Real Time with Bill Maher. A conservative going on Bill Maher's show is like entering the lion's den. The audience is rabidly liberal. The other guests are liberal. Bill Maher calls himself a libertarian, but he speaks against tax cuts and reductions in federal spending. So he's a liberal! But Snow was handling himself quite well. He was giving good arguments while coming across as a likable, affable fella. He was the same Tony Snow who had appeared on Crossfire years earlier, yet he had a lot more presence--or gravitas!
Bush picked Snow as his press secretary because he wanted someone who criticized him rather than trying to whitewash things (Scott McClellen--before he quit and wrote that book). But Snow turned out to be like most press secretaries: he defended the President. But he did it rather well. Plus, he didn't come across as an automaton when he did it, for he seemed like a genuine human being. I remember seeing him on Fox News, and he was a guest. He showed how the President was actually open to the Baker-Hamilton report, thereby contradicting the official liberal media line: that Bush would do what he wanted regardless of what anyone said. Snow made a good case.
His passing reminds me of the death of Lee Atwater: Even a person with power and influence will one day die. Death makes all of us equal, I guess.
But he made a positive contribution to the public discourse, for he defended his views while being a good person.