Bob Woodward called a senior White House official last week to tell him
that in a piece in that weekend’s Washington Post, he was going to
question President Barack Obama’s account of how sequestration came
about - and got a major-league brushback. The Obama aide “yelled at me
for about a half hour,” Woodward told us in an hour-long interview
yesterday around the Georgetown dining room table where so many
generations of Washington’s powerful have spilled their secrets.
Digging into one of his famous folders, Woodward said the tirade was
followed by a page-long email from the aide, one of the four or five
administration officials most closely involved in the fiscal
negotiations with the Hill. “I apologize for raising my voice in our
conversation today,” the official typed. “You’re focusing on a few
specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But
perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. … I think you will regret
staking out that claim.”
Woodward repeated the last sentence, making clear he saw it as a veiled
threat. “ ‘You’ll regret.’ Come on,” he said. “I think if Obama himself
saw the way they’re dealing with some of this, he would say, ‘Whoa, we
don’t tell any reporter ‘you’re going to regret challenging us.’ ”
The feud also feeds a larger narrative because, like many others,
Woodward thinks this is a very thin-skinned White House that does not
like being challenged on the facts. He said that explains the senior
aide’s in-your-face email. “I think when they get their rear end in a
crack here, they become defensive,” he said. “This could be a huge issue
if the economy takes a hit. And people are going to go back and say
exactly what happened and who did it and so forth.”
Watching and now having interviewed Woodward, it is easy to see why
White House officials get worked about him. He clearly is skeptical of
Obama’s approach to the job. “I’m not sure he fully understands the
power he has,” Woodward said. “He sees that the power is the public
megaphone going around to these campaign-like events, which is real, but
the audience he needs to deal with is on this issue of the sequester
and these budget issues is John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and Harry
Reid and Nancy Pelosi.”
Woodward also said that based on his reporting for the book, Obama
deserves more of the blame for scuttling the grand bargain of 2011 that
would have put sequestration to rest long ago. “He changed the deal and
it blew up,” Woodward said. “I mean, you look at the facts, and even by
the White House accounts by his aides, he was making a last-minute
change.”
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