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One of the wonderful by-products of Obama’s November loss will be the steady stream of tell-all books outlining the disasters in the administration and confirming what we always knew. It has started already. Rick Klein of ABC News introduces us to Bob Woodward’s new book.
An explosive mix of dysfunction, miscommunication, and misunderstandings inside and outside the White House led to the collapse of a historic spending and debt deal that President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner were on the verge of reaching last summer, according to revelations in author Bob Woodward’s latest book.
The book, “The Price of Politics,” on sale Sept. 11, 2012, shows how close the president and the House speaker were to defying Washington odds and establishing a spending framework that included both new revenues and major changes to long-sacred entitlement programs.
But at a critical juncture, with an agreement tantalizingly close, Obama pressed Boehner for additional taxes as part of a final deal — a miscalculation, in retrospect, given how far the House speaker felt he’d already gone. …
… The failure of Obama to connect with Boehner was vaguely reminiscent of another phone call late in the evening of Election Day 2010, after it became clear that the Republicans would take control of the House, making Boehner Speaker of the House.
Nobody in the Obama orbit could even find the soon-to-be-speaker’s phone number, Woodward reports. A Democratic Party aide finally secured it through a friend so the president could offer congratulations.
While questions persist about whether any grand bargain reached by the principals could have actually passed in the Tea Party-dominated Congress, Woodward issues a harsh judgment on White House and congressional leaders for failing to act boldly at a moment of crisis. Particular blame falls on the president.
“It was increasingly clear that no one was running Washington. That was trouble for everyone, but especially for Obama,” Woodward writes. …
… Obama found that he had little history with members of Congress to draw on. His administration’s early decision to forego bipartisanship for the sake of speed around the stimulus bill was encapsulated by his then-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel: “We have the votes. F— ‘em,” he’s quoted in the book as saying.
Obama’s relationship with Democrats wasn’t always much better. …
… Woodward portrays a president who remained a supreme believer in his own powers of persuasion, even as he faltered in efforts to coax congressional leaders in both parties toward compromise. Boehner told Woodward that at one point, when Boehner voiced concern about passing the deal they were working out, the president reached out and touched his forearm.
“John, I’ve got great confidence in my ability to sway the American people,” Boehner quotes the president as having told him.
But after the breakthrough agreement fell apart, Boehner’s “Plan B” would ultimately exclude the president from most of the key negotiations. The president was “voted off the island,” in Woodward’s phrase, even by members of his own party, as congressional leaders patched together an eleventh hour framework to avoid default.
Frustration over the lack of clear White House planning was voiced to Obama’s face at one point, with a Democratic congressional staffer taking the extraordinary step of confronting the president in the Oval Office.
With the nation facing the very real possibility of defaulting on its debt for the first time in its history, David Krone, the chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told the president directly that he couldn’t simply reject the only option left to Congress.
“It is really disheartening that you, that this White House did not have a Plan B,” Krone said, according to Woodward.
More on this book from Conn Carroll.
Arrogant, aloof, and unprepared is how Bob Woodward portrays President Obama in his new book The Price of Politics, set to be released next week.
The book recounts Obama’s troubled relationship with Congress, from his inauguration through last summer’s failed debt-limit negotiations, with Woodward concluding, “It is a fact that President Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition. But presidents work their will — or should work their will — on important matters of national business. . . . Obama has not.”
Snippets of the book, as reported by The Washington Post, include:
‘The book portrays Obama as a man of paradoxical impulses, able to charm an audience with his folksy manner but less adept and less interested in cultivating his relationships with Reid and Pelosi. While the president worries that he can’t rely on the two leaders, they are portrayed as impatient with him. As the final details of the 2009 stimulus package were being worked out on Capitol Hill, Obama phoned the speaker’s office to exhort the troops. Pelosi put the president on speakerphone so everyone could hear.
“Warming to his subject, he continued with an uplifting speech,” Woodward writes. “Pelosi reached over and pressed the mute button. They could hear Obama, but now he couldn’t hear them. The president continued speaking, his disembodied voice filling the room, and the two leaders got back to the hard numbers.” ’ …
Why is this such a nasty campaign? John Harris, one of Politico’s heavyweights, says the fault is largely Obama’s.
A crabby, negative campaign that has been more about misleading and marginal controversies than the major challenges facing the country? Barack Obama and Mitt Romney can both claim parenthood of this ugly child.
But there is a particular category of the 2012 race to the low road in which the two sides are not competing on equal terms: Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults than the Romney campaign.
With a few exceptions, Romney has maintained that Obama is a bad president who has turned to desperate tactics to try to save himself. But Romney has not made the case that Obama is a bad person, nor made a sustained critique of his morality a central feature of his campaign.
Obama, who first sprang to national attention with an appeal to civility, has made these kind of attacks central to his strategy. The argument, by implication from Obama and directly from his surrogates, is not merely that Romney is the wrong choice for president but that there is something fundamentally wrong with him.
To make the case, Obama and his aides have used an arsenal of techniques — personal ridicule, suggestions of ethical misdeeds and aspersions against Romney’s patriotism — that many voters and commentators claim to abhor, even as the tactics have regularly proved effective.
The unequal distribution of personal putdowns — Obama and his team indulging in them far more frequently than Romney — has been largely obscured by two factors. …
Jay Nordlinger gives his impressions of Fauxcahontas at the DNC.
… Over and over, Warren said, “The game is rigged. The system is rigged against you.” This is not just a lie, it is a harmful one — a lie with consequences. Because it locks people into the grievance culture (the same culture Condi Rice spoke against in that marvelous speech at the Republican convention).
We are damn lucky to be in America. The “system” is less rigged against us than it is against people practically everywhere else. We have a fairer shot than almost anybody.
Sometimes I think, “Americans are simultaneously the luckiest and most griping people in all the world.” This is why immigrants are sometimes shocked by us: Don’t we know how good we have it? No, we don’t, really.
I don’t know about you, but I was taught that America was a racist country, and almost a uniquely racist one. A singularly racist one. Then I grew up and found out: It’s damn near the least racist country in the entire world! Ever visited, studied, or lived in an Asian country, an Arab country, an African one?
We don’t know from racism.
In her speech, Warren expressed her gratitude for America, and in a charming way: “I’m grateful, down to my toes, for every opportunity that America gave me.” But much of the rest of her speech was grievance, grievance, grievance; blame, blame, blame. And not necessarily legitimate grievance and blame either. …