It's strange to entitle a post about Bob Woodward and Saturday Night Live but the two coalesced last night in my tv watching.
First, I caught Woodward on C-SPAN hawking his new book "The Price of Politics." The early reviews of it have been mixed. I'm sure it's worth reading and I will at some point-when I finish all the books ahead of it on my reading list.
Still, I find the whole tone of this book somewhat annoying. I say this both on the reviews and excerpts I have read and also his interview itself.
As to the critical reviews-the reviews of the mainstream media-there seems to be a sense that Woodward doesn't really give us anything in this book other than pure stenography. He simply records what was said but gives us no new insights or analysis.
No doubt, he argues that there's value in just being there, a fly on the wall, or better yet, a tape recorder. I'll buy that up to a point. I mean if he truly does nothing more than keep the minutes, it's still very helpful for the public in giving us an accurate record of what was done, said, etc.
Whether or not he should have done more, I don't know as I haven't read the book. Still, I presume that there will be other books that have more analysis and Woodward provides a great public service being kind of the nation's stenographer.
It did amuse me some his unhappiness with a caller who praised him for the service but said that it's great than an insider like him can get us this kind of inside view.
Right away Woodward stopped him-before he even finished his sentence-to correct him that he is in fact not an insider. This rather strains credulity. Woodward protested that he's merely an outsider trying to understand what's going on in the world. The caller let him go on that answering "aren't we all?!"
In reality though Woodward is not like us. I don't say this in anyway to admonish him. We need insiders-there will always only be a few who really get this kind of access but they perform an invaluable service. But let's face it. I'm must as interested in all this as Woodward is but can I meat with the President, his staff, and all those Congress men and women and their staffs?
Woodward's squeamishness about the simple word insider speaks volumes about a certain phony sensibility that he shares with many others who are in fact insiders.
What did get under my skin a little bit is his attitude of self-righteousness. In the interview in answer to some questions about who's fault the whole debt ceiling debacle was, he sang from David Brook's hymnal.
You know-that the book was merely a politically neutral documentation. As usual there's the implication that there's some innate value in simply not having an point of view. For all that, though, what he did say hardly sounded very politically neutral to me.
He was wringing his hands about the "rising debt burden" and was very alarmed about the coming "fiscal cliff." The subtext of all his handwringing is that he's a Very Serious Person (VSP) who unlike we not so serious souls, is aware that we're on the eve of financial Armageddon.
Yet his belief system here on the supposed crisis over spending, deficits, and debt show that he's hardly neutral. That there things are the biggest problems facing the nation are ideological assumptions which actually are quite questionable.
Like all VSPs, he's very worried about the deficit and the level of spending, and the words "unemployment" or "recession" let alone "stimulus" never came up. So while there may be virtue in having no point of view, he clearly comes in with a quite definite point of view.
What further got my goat, of course, was his quiet, tacit, blaming the President for the "failure" of a grand bargain or any implementation of Simpson-Bowles-this bill has become the Holy Grail of the VSP.
I, personally, am far from so enamored of SB. The C-SPAN host read a tweet from someone who tweeted him to ask why he blames the President?
It's a good question. For one thing, it further belies his claim that his book is politically neutral. For another in coming to this conclusion he totally gives the obstructionist GOP a pass.
Woodward's answer to this is pretty lame. Obama gets the blame because he's the President, and Presidents, Woodward believes, have a mythical, mystical ability to do something he calls work their will.
Supposedly other Presidents, who he holds to be greater than President Obama would have Svengali-like stared deeply into Mitch McConnell's eyes and hypnotize him into no longer having his first priority making him a one term President.
This is pretty silly, Indeed, I even here could quote George Will who talks about the childish superstitious belief we develop during election season of the President's abilities both internationally and domestically.
How exactly might Obama have worked his will? Woodward doesn't say. I guess his excuse is he's not the President so he doesn't have access to such powers.
Woodward even tries to exonerate McConnell's infamous desire to see the President fail. Woodward tries to revise history by giving McConnell a "context." The context is that McConnell didn't really want him to fail but wanted him to succeed by becoming Bill Clinton.
And I'm glad we've brought up Clinton yet again. Woodward believes that Clinton "worked his will" in the 90s. Yet, he forgets as does McConnell and all the Republicans so infatuated with Clinton today. They resisted Clinton just as much as the GOP did to Obama staring in 2009.
Yes, Gingrich and Dole worked with Clinton alright, and they proved this by shutting down the government. What happened is that the public rightly blamed the GOP for that.
Despite all Woodward's nattering negativity, I suspect that history will show that Obama achieved something very similar in 2010-as David Corn shows in his Showdown. The President won that standoff which is why the GOP has so little leverage with the approaching "fiscal cliff."
For more on this see Sumner
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=16394
Then again, Woodward seems to not know how our government even works. The President may have "the bully pulpit" but it's the House that actually writes the legislation. So how the GOP gets away with all their attempts to destroy the President with "sorry, but you're the President, nyah, nyah" I don't get.
So now, Saturday Night Live. They had this great bit last night about undecideds.
We are the undecideds and we are not so easy to please. We don't go for your spin. We have real questions we need answered: like who's running? Who is the current President? Is he running? How many years is his term? One? Two? Three? Or is it life? And if it's life, we have a problem with that. Can women vote? If not we have a problem with that. Or men for that matter? Can they vote? Because if it's no that's just as bad.
Then it finishes off with paid for by the Committee of Uninformed Voters.
I thought that bit was great and a good remedy to all the deference paid to the undecideds in the MSM. Garry Wills in his "Confessions of a Conservative" made this same point years ago: that informed voters are usually the frankest partisans, that it's an urban legend that those who take the longest to make up their mind are somehow more serious, or earnest, more determined to get the facts without the spin, etc.
It's a nice answer to Woodward's phony talk about his book being politically neutral as well. Clearly it has an agenda.
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