It’s a rare political event these days that summons the notoriously sharp tongue of Bob Dole, a man who since leaving the Senate in 1996 has done public service announcements with Bill Clinton and commercials for Viagra. But the new memoir from Scott McClellan, “What Happened” (PublicAffairs, 368 pages, $27.95) provoked the Bob Dole of old, who let slip an e-mail in which he called the former White House press secretary a “miserable creature” and questioned the manhood of the old Bush loyalist.

By now most readers will already know that the book purports to be a bombshell and accuses the White House of deceiving the public into war and dissembling about Karl Rove’s involvement in the leak of a former CIA operative’s name to the media during the time of Mr. McClellan’s service.

But this is not what grinds Mr. Dole — after all, the former Kansas senator has not stuck his neck out to defend the second Bush presidency. No, Mr. Dole is old-school. He is a man who understands that the modern politics of the world’s oldest democracy depends on a kind of feudalism. Politicians today cannot legislate, govern, and campaign on their own. These arts require skilled professionals. And in exchange for the reflected glory of the politician, and the opportunities he provides them, these public servants owe first and foremost their loyalty to the men who make them. It is not merely a matter of personal loyalty, but of the duty of public office.

It’s people like Mr. McClellan who threaten to upset this balance that makes our politics possible. Will future presidents even trust the counsel of their closest advisers, knowing some New York literary agent is waiting in the wings?

Well perhaps Bob Dole should rest easy. “What Happened” offers no bombshells, and no genuine disclosures. It is a 368-page banality. And the man whose reputation suffers the most from its publication is Mr. McClellan himself, who comes off like another famous American victim of Stockholm Syndrome, Patty Hearst.

In this case, Mr. McClellan’s adopted political vocabulary is drawn from the left-wing base of the Democratic party and the journalists who took them seriously between 2003 and 2004. Like them, Mr. McClellan clings to the delusion that the White House’s handling of Joe Wilson’s allegations was a violation of public trust as destructive as Watergate. Mr. McClellan here adopts the lexicon of the activist left, referring at times to the White House’s “war on” Mr. Wilson, without ever quite disclosing the most important fact of the saga, that Mr. Wilson’s account of the episode was deeply misleading.

In light of what is now known about the entire Wilson affair — that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the trip to Niger by his wife, that his debriefing to the CIA on Saddam’s pursuit of uranium was less categorical than he would later claim, and that it was the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, who first leaked Ms. Plame’s name, not Karl Rove — it is strange that the former press secretary still considers Mr. Wilson the victim and his old boss his tormenter.

The account of the buildup to war is an additional curiosity. Mr. McClellan, who elsewhere makes such a show of support for government transparency, seems personally offended by President Bush’s admission that he authorized the leak of portions of the National Intelligence Estimate, which gave the public only more information in the run-up to the war. That admission, Mr. McClellan writes, left him in “stunned disbelief,” and led, it seems, to his change of heart, and presumably to the publication of this scurrilous book.

Still, Mr. McClellan can’t bring himself to repeat in whole the slogans of net-left. He writes that Mr. Bush did not lie in the run-up to the Iraq war, but that he sold the policy to the American people in a “permanent campaign mode.” Throughout the book, Mr. McClellan expresses regret that the “campaign” to the make the case to the American people was a campaign at all.

“Changing the tone and ending the partisan warfare in Washington was no longer a consideration,” he writes of the 2004 presidential campaign. “As far as the spirited political competitor Bush was concerned, it was a time to stand firm and starkly clarify the choice facing the American people ahead of the coming election. His presidency was on the line. His legacy was at stake. He would bet it all on Iraq.”

Well, good for Mr. Bush. Would Mr. McClellan rather have the commander in chief give mealy-mouthed concessions to the people in 2004 who sought to leave Iraq to the mercies of its neighbors while our soldiers were in the field?

As poorly as this book reflects on its author, it also says something about the way Mr. Bush has run his administration. As the saying in Washington goes, one is only as good as one’s staff. And the illiterate naïf who wrote this memoir could only have been chosen for the loyalty he has just betrayed.

elake@nysun.com