“Stop Indulging Him”: Bob Woodward Demands Law-Ignoring, Mind-Controlling Presidential Leadership
Bob Woodward rocked Washington this weekend with an editorial that hammered President Obama for inventing “the sequester” and then being rude enough to ask that Congress not make us have the sequester. Woodward went on “Morning Joe” this morning, and he continued his brutal assault:
“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’” Woodward said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“Or George W. Bush saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to invade Iraq because I can’t get the aircraft carriers I need’ or even Bill Clinton saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to attack Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters,’ as he did when Clinton was president because of some budget document?” Woodward added. “Under the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the president going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement, I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country. That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time.”
Speaking of kinds of madness, Woodward’s actual position here is insane. As Dave Weigel points out, “some budget document” is a law, passed by Congress and signed by the president. Woodward is saying, why won’t the president just ignore the law, because he is the commander in chief, and laws should not apply to him. That is a really interesting perspective, from a man who is famous for his reporting on the extralegal activities of a guy who is considered a very bad president!
Also, that George W. Bush analogy is amazing. It would have been a good thing for him to invade and occupy Iraq without congressional approval? Say what you will about George W. Bush, at least he was really, really devoted to invading Iraq. (And yes the Reagan line, lol.)
There is nothing less important about “the sequester” than the question of whose idea it originally was. So, naturally, that is the question that much of the political press is obsessed with, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Republicans have been making the slightly incoherent argument that a) the sequester, which is a bad thing, is entirely Obama’s fault, b) Obama is exaggerating how bad the sequester will be, and c) the sequester, which is Obama’s fault, is preferable to not having the sequester. Woodward has lately been fixated on Obama’s responsibility for the idea of the sequester, but at this point, the important question is who will be responsible if it actually happens. On that question, Woodward, and others, have taken the position that it will be Obama’s fault because he has failed to “show leadership.” But laws come from Congress. The president signs or vetoes them. Republicans in the House are unwilling and unable to repeal the law Congress passed creating the sequester. All Obama can do is ask them to pass such a law, and to make the case to the public that they should pass such a law. And Obama has been doing those things, a lot.
Woodward’s most recent Obama book also took the position that presidents “should work their will … on important matters of national business,” though how one’s will should be worked on a congressional opposition party led by a weak leader and unwilling even to negotiate with the president is never really explained. As Jonathan Chait points out, “use mind control to get your way” is an incredibly popular argument among centrist establishment political reporters and analysts. It is a convenient way of taking a debate where most people agree that one side has a reasonable position and the other side an unreasonable position and making it still something you can blame “both sides” for. Sure, the Republicans are both hapless and fanatical, but the president should make them not be.
Bob Woodward’s name is synonymous with Quality Journalism, mostly because of one really good movie. The movie, based on a book that is riddled with exaggeration and misdirection, permanently established Woodward as the best shoe-leather reporter in politics, though his modern reporting style does not put too much of a strain on his Ferragamo loafers: He simply talks to powerful people in his kitchen and then “re-creates” events based on what they tell him. Powerful people talk to Woodward because of his reputation, and because talking to Woodward is the best way to ensure that they come across well in his best-selling books. They talk because they figure if they don’t give him a self-serving account of events, someone else will give him a version that makes them look bad. My dream is a Washington where no one talks to Woodward, but until that happens people will continue to pay attention to his biennial book-promoting cable news blitzes and occasional appearances in the pages of the newspaper that continued to pay him a salary — despite his withholding most of his original reporting from that newspaper — until quite recently.
In 2010 he said a Hillary Clinton-Joe Biden switch was “on the table,” although it was not. He suffered no professional consequences for saying made-up nonsense. Bob Woodward has lost it, let’s all stop indulging him.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, February 27, 2013
“At The Urinals In The Bathroom”: Falling Into Bob Woodward’s Den Of Iniquity
When I got to my computer this morning and saw how many people were blathering about Bob Woodward, a wave of despair washed over me. First, because this is the kind of stupid argument from which we thought we could get something of a reprieve once the campaign ended, and second, because Bob Woodward himself, and the deference with which he is treated, just make me depressed.
It’s not that Woodward isn’t a good reporter, of a sort. But Watergate was pretty much the last time his reporting enhanced public understanding in a meaningful way. Woodward’s modus operandi since then has been to approach powerful people and convince them to tell their side of major events through him. Knowing that if they don’t, someone else will and they might come out looking bad, many of them give him their spin in great detail, which his books then pass on to a wide readership. They aren’t so much a record of events as a record of events as the people who talked to Bob Woodward would like us to see them. Nobody has done more than Woodward to elevate insiderism, the belief among many journalists that what matters isn’t the effect government has on people’s lives, but who said what to whom when, that if you can get the Secretary of State to tell you what he said to the National Security Advisor while they were at the urinals in the bathroom down the hall from the Oval Office, then you’re a hero of democracy.
I’m not saying there’s no value in that kind of reporting—we do want to know what policy makers are thinking, how they interact with each other, and so on. The mistake is to think it’s the only thing that matters. And I think that explains why Woodward is now finding himself at odds with the White House.
This whole thing started because Woodward had previously reported that the idea for the sequester originally came from the White House, in his last book. When the book was published it seemed like just one detail among many, but as we approached the sequester, Republicans decided that it was hugely important, making “Don’t blame us, it was all his idea!” their primary talking point, and citing Woodward again and again. Now the truth is that the question of who thought of it first is completely irrelevant; Republicans agreed to it and voted for it, so they can’t absolve themselves of responsibility for it, not to mention the fact that this all came about because of their hostage-taking, and we’re only in the position we are now because they refuse to compromise with Democrats. But now that important people in Washington were talking about a piece of information that came out of his reporting, Bob Woodward rushed to tell everyone that this piece of information is the most important thing to understand about this debate. After all, it was his scoop! And he got it by getting powerful people to tell him about their conversations with other powerful people. So that must be what matters.
When asked, he might have said, “Sure, I reported that the idea first came from the White House, but at this point, who cares?” Instead, he decided to wade in like he was auditioning for a job at the Daily Caller. He went on television to talk about this fantastic scoop of his. Then he wrote an op-ed charging that because the sequester itself doesn’t have tax increases in it, Obama is “moving the goalposts” by demanding that a deal to replace the sequester have at least some revenue in it, which is kind of like arguing that if yesterday we said we were going to have pizza for lunch today, but it turned out nobody wants pizza, you’re being unfair by suggesting sandwiches, because yesterday you had agreed to pizza. Then he poured contempt on Obama for not just breaking the law and having government do everything it was otherwise doing, regardless of the sequester (this is a variant of the most bizarre delusion currently gripping centrist Washington, that any problem could be solved if Obama would just “lead,” or maybe make a “firm presidential statement”).
Then after White House Budget Nebbish Gene Sperling yelled at Woodward about that op-ed, he gave an interview to Politico claiming Sperling had threatened him in an email. In fact, in the email Sperling apologized for yelling at Woodward, and the “threat” was this: “But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim. The idea that the sequester was to force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand bargain with a mix of entitlements and revenues (even if there were serious disagreements on composition) was part of the DNA of the thing from the start…” That’s some terrifying threatening, which is probably why Woodward replied, “You do not ever have to apologize to me. You get wound up because you are making your points and you believe them. This is all part of a serious discussion. I for one welcome a little heat; there should be more given the importance.” You can just smell his fear, can’t you?
Anyhow, Bob Woodward is very good at getting powerful people to tell him their side of a given story, when they might ignore similar requests from other reporters. The mistake is to assume that once you’ve gotten that, there isn’t much more to know. I’ll leave you with this, from Jonathan Chait, who argues persuasively that Woodward’s problem is that whatever his abilities as a reporter, he’s a terrible analyst:
To reconcile Woodward’s journalistic reputation with the weird pettiness of his current role, one has to grasp the distinction between his abilities as a reporter and his abilities as an analyst. Woodward was, and remains, an elite gatherer of facts. But anybody who has seen him commit acts of political commentary on television has witnessed a painful spectacle. As an analyst, Woodward is a particular kind of awful — a Georgetown Wise Man reliably and almost invariably mouthing the conventional wisdom of the Washington Establishment.
His more recent books often compile interesting facts, but how Woodward chooses to package those facts has come to represent a barometric measure of a figure’s standing within the establishment. His 1994 account of Bill Clinton’s major budget bill, which in retrospect was a major success, told a story of chaos and indecision. He wrote a fulsome love letter to Alan Greenspan, “Maestro,” at the peak of the Fed chairman’s almost comic prestige. In 2003, when George W. Bush was still a decisive and indispensable war leader, Woodward wrote a heroic treatment of the Iraq War. After Bush’s reputation had collapsed, Woodward packaged essentially the same facts into a devastating indictment. Woodward’s book on the 2011 debt negotiations was notable for arguing that Obama scotched a potential deficit deal. The central argument has since been debunked by no less a figure than Eric Cantor, who admitted to Ryan Lizza that he killed the deal.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 28, 2013
“In The Mosh Pit”: The Self-Centered Political Media
With many Americans alternately bored and infuriated by the latest made-for-TV fiscal melodrama in Washington, something highly unusual happened. A prominent, name-brand pundit published a column about the “sequestration” battle that was not merely smug, lazy and condescending, but factually false.
So what else is new, right?
What’s newsworthy is that when somebody he couldn’t ignore called him out, the columnist was forced to publicly eat his words. Newsworthy for two reasons: first, because regardless of what they claim about their strict code of professional ethics, Washington political journalists normally cover for each other like cops and Roman Catholic clerics.
It’s been going on for a generation, and worsening as TV stardom and the lecture circuit have made celebrity pundits wealthy.
Second, because of what David Brooks’ blunder says about the “fever swamp of the center,” as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait calls it: a mindset reflecting the desperate pretense that “both sides” are equally responsible for Washington’s endless budgetary crises, and all that’s necessary to resolve them is a mature spirit of compromise.
And maybe too what the whole charade says about the audience for such piffle: an American public that’s better informed about Tom Brady’s new contract and Kim Kardashian’s cup size than the national budget deficit.
How New York Times editors waved David Brooks’ column into print is a mystery. One had the impression things had improved there since the heyday of Jeff Gerth and Judith Miller—whose inept reporting helped bring us the Whitewater hoax and the Iraq War, respectively.
“The DC Dubstep,” Brooks called the column; the joke being that budget sequestration gave Democrats and Republicans alike a chance to do “the dance moves they enjoy the most.”
“Under the Permanent Campaign Shimmy,” Brooks wrote, “the president identifies a problem. Then he declines to come up with a proposal to address the problem. Then he comes up with a vague-but-politically-convenient concept that doesn’t address the problem (let’s raise taxes on the rich). Then he goes around the country blasting the opposition….The president hasn’t actually come up with a proposal to avert sequestration, let alone one that is politically plausible.”
Ha, ha, ha! See, Obama’s failure to lead then encourages Republicans to do the “Suicide Stage Dive,” working themselves “into a frenzy of self-admiration,” and leaping “into what they imagine is [sic] the loving arms of their adoring fans” only to “land with a thud on the floor.”
Probably a sober-sided fellow like Brooks shouldn’t attempt satire, which requires a subversive imagination. Also a regular on PBS and NPR, he plays a non-carnivorous Republican—conservative, yes, but not somebody who’s going to carry an AR-15 to a Washington cocktail party.
But the problem with Brooks’ column is more basic. Because love it or hate it, the White House long ago presented a detailed plan for averting sequestration. President Obama has been flying around the country talking it up every day. You can read it here.
Kevin Drum neatly summarized the contents: “specific cuts to entitlements, including the adoption of chained CPI for Social Security and $400 billion in various cuts to healthcare spending, along with further cuts to mandatory programs as well as to both defense and domestic discretionary programs. Altogether, it clocks in at $1.1 trillion in spending cuts and $700 billion in revenue increases, mostly gained from limiting tax deductions for high-end earners.”
In short, you can call the White House plan anything you like. But you can’t call it non-existent. The entire premise of Brooks’ column was false; the political equivalent of criticizing Bill Belichick’s poor coaching in the 2013 Super Bowl. (His team didn’t get there.) A sportswriter would be laughed out of the press room; maybe out of journalism.
But hey, it’s only national politics, and only the New York Times.
Enter Ezra Klein, the Washington Post’s ubiquitous blogger. An ambitious lad of 28, Klein had the temerity to pick up the phone. Apparently, the youngster didn’t understand that these things simply aren’t done. His column, he informed Brooks, was rubbish. Would he like to talk about it?
To his credit, Brooks did, but not before adding an online postscript to his column explaining that he’d “written in a mood of justified frustration over …fiscal idiocy,” and “should have acknowledged the balanced and tough-minded elements in the president’s approach.”
A transcript of Brooks’ deeply embarrassing conversation with his younger rival was posted online. Give him this much: Brooks definitely faced the music. So frank an admission of error rarely appears in the high-dollar press.
And what about you, dear reader?
Recently Bloomberg News published a poll. Asked if the nation’s budget deficit was growing or shrinking, only 6% answered correctly: it’s going down. This year’s projected deficit is $600 billion smaller than when President Obama took office.
If you didn’t know that, maybe you’re also part of the problem.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, February 27, 2013
“Pushing False Equivalencies”: The Consequences Of Misguided Assumptions
I’m beginning to think an infectious disease is spreading in the nation’s capital. Symptoms include memory loss (forgetting everything Republicans have done in recent years), blurred vision (an inability to see obvious GOP ploys), and an uncontrollable urge to blame “both sides” for everything, even when it doesn’t make any sense.
The disease has already affected pundits like Bob Woodward, Ron Fournier, David Brooks, nearly everyone on the network Sunday shows, and today reaches the editorial board of the Washington Post. Indeed, the Post‘s editors seem to have come down with an especially acute case today, as evidenced this bang-your-head-against-your-desk editorial on the sequester, which cavalierly ignores the paper’s own reporting, and demands that President Obama “lead” by somehow getting congressional Republicans to be more responsible.
You can almost feel James Fallows’ frustration.
In short the facts before us are: an Administration that has gone some distance toward “the center”; a Republican opposition many of whose members still hold the absolutist position that taxes cannot go up at all; a hidden-from-no-one opposition strategy that embraces crises, shutdowns, and sequesters rather than wanting to avert them. […]
That’s the landscape. And what is the Post’s editorial conclusion? You guessed it! The President is to blame, for not “leading” the way to a compromise.
The infectious disease — I’ll assume Fallows was inoculated and therefore immune to its effects — is leading to some kind of bizarre madness in Washington, which is getting worse. It doesn’t matter that President Obama is ready to compromise; it doesn’t matter that Republicans refuse to compromise; and it doesn’t matter that the deficit is already shrinking and that both sides have already approved $2.5 trillion in debt reduction.
What matters, victims of this disease keep telling the rest of us, is that President Obama is obligated to “lead.” Lead where? They don’t know. Lead to what? They don’t know that, either. What would leadership look like, exactly? Apparently, Obama is supposed to use Jedi mind tricks that will make people in the other party — the party that has nothing but contempt and disgust for his presidency — do what he wants them to do.
And if the president doesn’t do this, Obama is, by definition, responsible for Republicans’ opposition to a bipartisan agreement.
This is more than crazy. The media establishment’s incompetence is having a direct role in contributing to a broken and unconstructive process.
Greg Sargent gets this exactly right:
The argument now is basically that the president is the father who must make his problem children behave. Only this is worse than just a dodge. Lots and lots of people are going to get hurt by the sequester. Anyone who helps deflect blame from Republicans — in the full knowledge that they are the primary obstacle to the compromise we need to prevent serious damage from being done to the country — is unwittingly helping to enable their intransigence.
This will no doubt give headaches to those who’ve already contracted the infectious disease, but Greg is right — by blaming Obama for Republicans’ intransigence, the D.C. establishment is encouraging the gridlock they claim to find offensive.
As Jamison Foser recently asked, “When Party A is intransigent but Party B gets blamed for it, what is the likely effect on Party A’s intransigence?” Or as Michael Grunwald added today, “If you were a GOP leader, and every time you were intransigent the Beltway blamed Obama’s failure to lead, would you be less intransigent?”
Pundits obsessed with pushing false equivalencies and needlessly blaming “both sides” are convinced they’re part of the solution. They’re actually part of the problem.
Let’s not forget this thesis from Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein — who’ve helped offer a cure to this infectious disease — published nearly a year ago, long before the current mess.
We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.
Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?
The first step towards recovery from the disease has nothing to do with party or ideology; it has to do with reality and Civics 101. The media establishment is, as a consequence of this disease, forced to shout “Lead!” uncontrollably, they can at least direct it to those in a position of authority in the party that refuses to compromise, refuses to consider concessions, and refuses to consider governing outside a series of extortion strategies.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 26, 2013
“Economic Royalists”: The Panic Of The Plutocrats
It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.
And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.
And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”
The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.
This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 9, 2011
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