I know there are no shortages of analyses dissecting Woodward's descent into absurd performance art, but I still feel compelled to recommend a full reading of today's post by Jonathan Chait entitled, What the hell happened to Bob Woodward?
What Chait adds is a bit of historical context. I'll quote a bit below Mr. Squiggly, but encourage you all to read his entire article.
Initially, Chait covers now well-trod ground in pointing out that Gene Sperling - who supposedly issued the "threat" - was merely advising him that he "would regret tarnishing his reputation with an easily debunked claim."
Then, Chait gives the history:
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.
And here, Chait gives Woodward a new title:
Woodward has been forcefully advocating this absurdity in a way that illuminates his role as an Establishment cipher. The Establishment view of the budget war is that Obama’s position is completely correct. (That is, of course, a kind of bias — an important one that defines the Republican anti-tax position out of the debate). But Establishmentarians believe even more strongly in “bipartisanship.” The contradiction between the two beliefs leads bipartisan thinkers to any number of silly mental dodges to escape the paradox. Some of them simply ignore Obama’s position, or deny it altogether. A more common dodge, taken up by Woodward and several other bipartisan types, is to insist that Obama must somehow compel Republicans to abandon their anti-tax ideology. Woodward apparently believes — I write “apparently” because Woodward’s position here isn’t coherent enough to define with any certainty — that Obama should actually ignore the law altogether -