The Price Of Politics – Bob Woodward, 2011 ★★½

The Deal that Failed

Access to the powerful is Bob Woodward’s stock-in-trade, his formula for turning somewhat pedestrian and shallow accounts of current affairs into commercially viable, relevant books.

But what happens when demonstrating that access trumps a thesis or storyline? The Price Of Politics got me thinking about that.

In July, 2011, the United States teetered on the edge of a crisis unlike any the nation had experienced. At issue was whether to raise the debt ceiling in the face of continued government spending. The Democrats, led by President Barack Obama, said this was the only way to meet the nation’s responsibilities, particularly that of guarantor of global solvency. The Republicans, led by House Speaker John Boehner, wanted deep spending cuts, and with control of the nation's debt limit, had the clout to get them.

The result: A long, painful, and protracted battle where compromise became an early casualty of posturing and pandering to the parties’ farthest wings.

“The debt limit crisis was a time of peril for the United States, its economy and its place in the global financial order,” Woodward writes. “When you examine the record in depth, you cannot help but conclude that neither President Obama nor Speaker Boehner handled it particularly well. Despite their evolving personal relationship, neither was able to transcend their fixed partisan convictions and dogmas.”

While not one of Woodward’s more attention-getting tomes, The Price Of Politics made a splash when it arrived in bookstores, mostly for the unflattering portraits it paints of the key participants in the budget battle. While both Republicans and Democrats, not to mention the various factions within the two parties, come in for criticism, most of the notice Woodward’s book got, from left and from right, was his handling of the President. “His harshest words are reserved for Mr. Obama,” wrote The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani in a September 2012 review.

There is room to question this. Woodward certainly seems more philosophically aligned with the goals of President Obama and the other Democrats than he is with Republicans. Time and again he emphasizes the Republicans’ stubborn refusal to consider tax increases, or even eliminating a tax cut on the richest Americans enacted by Congress during the administration of President Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. All the while, Woodward notes, Republicans claimed to be serious about deficit reduction, which Woodward paints as an impossibility without revenue increases.

If The Price Of Politics was a book about ideology, or fiscal philosophy, it’s very possible President Obama would have been presented in a different, more favorable light. But the focus with Woodward is almost invariably on process, and there the president comes off badly.

Early on we get a sense of President Obama as a man who talks about bipartisanship without believing in it. His big-government vision was clear right away, with both a giant economic stimulus package and government-sponsored health care as main goals. Woodward notes even some Obama staff wondered if their boss had “Roosevelt envy.” Such a mindset dismissed concerns of small-government, free-market conservatives; President Obama did little to hide this:

Obama had demonstrated that he believed he didn’t need any other input. The Republicans were outsiders, outcasts. The president and the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate would go it alone. There was no compromise.

There wasn’t even outreach, congressional Republicans note. At President Obama’s first post-inaugural meeting with Republican legislators, he cut off discussion by informing them that “I won.” Legislation was subsequently hammered out in Democrat-only meetings. Yet he was still surprised when not a single Republican voted for either his stimulus or healthcare plans.

A sizable chunk of one chapter is spent on the story of one Republican member of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan. After drawing up a Republican economic plan in response to President Obama’s challenge, he is invited to a presidential address, and even given a prize seat. Then he watches as the President uses the Ryan plan as a piñata to score points about hard-hearted Republicans sticking it to the poor and elderly. Photographers, cued where Ryan is seated by the President’s staff, snap away at the helpless target of presidential scorn:

Ryan felt betrayed. He’d expected an olive branch. What he got was the finger.

Sticking it to Republicans was harmless fun for a while. Then came the 2010 midterm elections, and a 64-seat swing from D to R in the House of Representatives. Suddenly Ryan had a gavel, as Budget Committee chairman. So did John Boehner, as Speaker of the House. So unprepared for this was President Obama’s staff that no one had Boehner’s phone number ready so the president could congratulate the incoming speaker.

President Barack Obama (left) and his main Republican counterpart, House Speaker John Boehner. About the only thing they agreed on in the end was that politics were hard. [Image from www.bostonglobe.com]

This personal stuff is kind of fun in a gory sort of way. But it only goes so far. Be warned: If you are looking for a focused analysis about the national budget, and in particular government’s knack for writing checks it can’t cash, you have a lot of weeds to walk through.

Much of Woodward’s reporting turns on jargon-y concerns over such things as “decoupling,” “unbalanced triggers,” “firewalls” and “bonus depreciation.” The Republicans keep trying to move away from discussing revenue, openly admitting they don’t trust Democrats to use additional taxes for deficit reduction. The Democrats find themselves incensed by counteroffers that focus on scaling back Medicare and Social Security, bedrocks of liberal social policy.

A typical passage reads like this:

[U. S. Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner aimed at the heart of the Republican argument that growing the economy would increase revenue. ‘One of the things we should do is take off the table growth assumptions that help us wish away the problems.’ Growing the economy would increase tax revenue, but nobody knew by how much. He was saying what they all knew. The Congressional Budget Office refused to use assumptions about future growth. Even Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, while slightly more willing to consider the future impact of tax proposals, wouldn’t base future revenue estimates on growth assumptions.

Sometimes the back-and-forth has its moments:

They kept coming back to the question of revenue, and the Republicans’ refusal to address it.

“This is our come-to-Jesus moment,” Biden said.

“Yeah,” said [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor, who is Jewish, “but I’m not very good on that point.”

Cantor’s joke masked a serious point: Biden shouldn’t expect any sudden conversions from the Republicans on taxes.

The Price Of Politics brings up differences between Boehner and Cantor; the latter perceived by President Obama and his staff to be much more hostile to tax increases. When Woodward depicts Cantor finding out that Boehner had been discussing his own budget bargain with the president in a series of secret White House get-togethers, it’s the closest we get to a dramatic moment.

The disconnect between Boehner and Cantor was a topic of conversation among White House staff. The tension was so obvious, [White House Director of Legislative Affairs Rob] Nabors joked, that he felt awkward being in the same room with the two of them.

But Boehner and Cantor remain united, as does Republican opposition to revenue hikes. Yet there is a breakthrough, when Boehner lines up Republican support at the eleventh hour for $800 billion in new revenue, in exchange for proportional across-the-board budget cuts. Yet in one of the book’s most controversial passages, President Obama throws a monkey wrench into the works in a final call to Boehner by demanding $400 billion more in revenue.

Woodward gets both men on the record. Boehner describes it as a flat demand; President Obama as more of a request to help him get more support from Democrats in Congress. The end result is the same, with Boehner ending the negotiation and the president “spewing coals.”

Eventually a deal is reached. Yet no one is happy, and Woodward presents each side explaining why the other can’t be trusted. Even beyond the burning issue of ensuring national solvency, Woodward seems perplexed by the failure of bipartisan comity.

After all, both sides had things in common; most important their desire to talk to Woodward. The strongest takeaway you get from The Price Of Power is the access Woodward had to the thoughts and feelings of everyone involved proves in the end a limiting factor. You need some distance, some authoritative perspective, as to what happened in terms of the deal that did not get made. Woodward instead wants to work his sources more and more, pulling out recondite details with you on his shoulder. The end result is involving, yet thin gruel in terms of drawing conclusions.