Woodward vs. White House

His journalistic revelations about Watergate brought Nixon down and he has since dealt with every subsequent U.S. president. He doesn’t think highly of Obama’s abilities as a crisis manager and says the Democrat is to blame for the destructive sequester. This assessment has now resulted in an absurd dispute that tells a great deal about Washington-style politics.

Last Friday, Woodward picked up the telephone and informed a White House advisor that an article would be appearing in the Sunday print version of the Washington Post and was already available on the newspaper’s website. In it, Woodward described Obama as a terrible crisis manager – a thesis lifted from his own book “The Price of Politics.” Woodward wrote that Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew proposed the sequester, thus making Obama responsible for the negative results of the budget cuts. Additionally, he accused the president of dishonesty in labeling Republicans as obstructionist.

In an interview with the influential political insider publication Politico, Woodward described White House staffer Gene Sperling’s response as a rant lasting half an hour. Sperling subsequently sent Woodward an e-mail in which he apologized for his tantrum but maintained that Woodward’s characterization was nonetheless faulty.

“You focus on a few specific trees that give a very wrong perception of the forest.” Sperling’s e-mail went on to say, “I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about moving the goal post,” he wrote. “I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.” Sperling recounted the incident similarly in an article he wrote entitled “Woodward at War,” a tribute to Woodward’s book “Bush at War.” Woodward chose to focus on Sperling’s closing sentence, interpreting it as a veiled threat – an interpretation that has gotten more of Washington’s attention than the budget crisis itself.

Woodward said that he, as an experienced journalist, had no problems with such rhetoric but that his younger colleagues might well tremble in fear under similar circumstances, remarking, “I don’t think it’s the way to operate.” Woodward later repeated this view on CNN.

An adviser to the president threatened legendary journalist Bob Woodward? That immediately became the subject of blogs, cable news outlets and via Twitter under the hashtag #Woodwardgate. It was tailor-made for a city that is regularly set abuzz by rumors that don’t deserve a second look.

It should be kept in mind that the 69-year old journalist himself referred to Obama’s tactics as “madness” in his Politico interview and that Republicans now cite that as evidence of bad faith exhibited by Obama supporters in the budget battle. They will use Woodward as their star witness to support their side in the continuing debate.

The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky asked whether Sperling’s comment is even remotely threatening. His conclusion: “That’s a threat? Insane.” The Politico version of the exchange written by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, both former colleagues of Bob Woodward at the Washington Post, begins to unravel, as reported by Buzzfeed, because of a few loud-mouths around Gene Sperling. The complete text of the email exchange was subsequently made public.

The full text makes clear the fact that Woodward quoted just selected passages from Sperling’s email, omitting those that clearly don’t support the threat claim.

More and more journalists joined the discussion on Thursday, saying that Republicans and Democrats who want to delay making serious proposals to avoid the sequester still have time. Nick Confessore of the New York Times said he found nothing threatening in any of the emails, adding that if anything, they accentuated the incestuous relationship between politics and the media in Washington.

Ron Fournier, until recently editor-in-chief of the National Journal, wrote an editorial entitled “Why Bob Woodward’s Fight With the White House Matters to You,” revealing how he had regularly suffered verbal abuse from the same White House source. Fournier is concerned that moral decline and brutal competition will make it increasingly difficult to control the powerful in Washington.

Jonathan Cohn, on the other hand, accused Woodward of having a thin skin and even thinner arguments. Cohn also told of being the target of Sperling’s rants and said that anyone who doesn’t know how rough it can get in Washington politics and how inclined Obama’s people are to cuss at reporters is hopelessly naïve. Cohn repeated the point that Woodward is in an unparalleled and unprecedented position to gather his material, yet his analyses often fail to reflect that advantage.

And in reality, the argument that Obama is responsible for the sequester that will cut $1.2 trillion between now and 2021 because one of his staff put the suggestion forth is true, but only in the narrowest sense: Both sides approved the suggestion because they both started from the assumption that the two sides would be able to reach mutual agreement. And both sides, in fact, put forth suggestions toward that goal. What Matthew Yglesias said is true: “Either everyone’s moving the goalposts or no one is moving them.”

And what is Bob Woodward (who most of his colleagues think is guilty of exaggeration) doing in the meantime? He chose to appear exclusively on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, of all places, where he claims he never felt threatened. In his home newspaper, the Washington Post, he claimed to be a little amused by all the excitement. This surprise announcement about his reaction to the reports seems a bit odd coming from someone who has been watching Washington power politics from behind the scenes for decades.

One thing Woodward did get right: Americans outside the Beltway can’t understand why government is incapable of action at a time when the two parties – despite high unemployment and the negative effect of automatic budget cuts – still find themselves deadlocked. For “People out in the non-Washington world, because of the nature of gridlock and not fixing things in Washington, this is a source of total wonder to them,” he reckoned. “In a way, the biggest story in this town is about the town itself. People wonder what’s going on here. And every now and again, you get another example of how things operate.”