Ex-Bush press secretary McClellan endorses Barack Obama

This just in: Scott McClellan, President Bush’s former press secretary, announced Thursday that he is endorsing Barack Obama for president.

McClellan is the second former Bush administration official this week to come out in support of the Democratic presidential candidate. Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell announced his endorsement last weekend.

McClellan’s news, which he shared during a taping of comedian D.L. Hughley’s new show on CNN, doesn’t come as a huge surprise. McClellan, after all, drew ire from Republicans earlier this year when he published a tell-all book about his time in White House. The book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” was highly critical of Bush and his handling of the war in Iraq, which McClellan called “a serious strategic blunder.”

The former aide told Hughley he planned to vote for Obama because he is the candidate most likely to change Washington.

McClellan became Bush’s press secretary in the summer of 2003 — shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq. He resigned the post two years ago. At the time, their split appeared to be fairly amicable (on the day that McClellan resigned, President Bush told reporters that he and the outgoing aide someday would be “rocking in chairs in Texas and talking about the good old days”). But McClellan later wrote that he quit in part because he felt deceived by the Bush White House.

Specifically, McClellan accused former administration officials Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby of misleading him during the investigation into the 2003 exposure of then-CIA operative Valerie Plame.