I’m skimming Bob Woodward’s book on the Obama Administration – The Price of Politics. I’ve read his books for years. They’re dry recitations of his reporting, utterly passionless and very readable.
In the last few years though, he’s begun to sound a bit like the ‘get off my lawn’ guy (encroaching on traditional McCain territory!). Still, he writes a good book. So I sat down and I began.
By page 20, Woodward is giving credence to a complaint uttered by Eric Cantor after the vote on HR1, the first bill of that congress, Obama’s stimulus package. Cantor had whipped the congressional Republicans so effectively that not a single one of them voted for the bill. Not one.
Woodward:
What. . . surprised Cantor was how badly the White House had played what should have been a winning hand. Though Obama won the vote, he had unified and energized the losers (really? he was the one that did it?). . . . he had actually pushed them away . . . there had been no sincere contact, no inclusiveness, no real listening.
The vote, and Cantor’s complaint, came on January 28, 2009, eight days after Obama was inaugurated. A period during which Obama had met three times with the House leadership – including Cantor.
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
Whatever Works 
Woodward has become a total tool. Just like the Washington Post, actually. Both drank the kool aid.
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Woodward and the Washington Post both deserve to be in the shitter.
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Agree with you both. They went way off the rails when Fred Hiatt became editor and they took up the clarion call to GO TO IRAQ! I fully expect he’s looking at Syria with a lover’s gaze . . .
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Meanwhile, I was watching the morning news, which interview Eric Cantor … and it didn’t take long for me to turn the channel.
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Ah…Yes!
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You could be forgiven for not having heard of Wayne Powell. Until Virginia’s 7th District Democratic Committee chose him by caucus to throw at Eric Cantor, the well-coiffed, sparkly toothed House majority leader who holds the district’s congressional seat, few had. To make Powell’s quest even more quixotic, the 7th District votes Republican so reflexively that the national Dems, including the party’s “Drive for 25” campaign to take back the House, have pretty much left Powell to fend for himself. Which is why Powell, a lawyer and decorated Army veteran, was in town with fellow political outsider Rob Zerban for a low-key fundraiser at the Pacific Palisades home of actress Barbara Bosson (Hill Street Blues, Murder One). Zerban is vying for Wisconsin’s 1st District House seat, whose incumbent is Paul Ryan —a man with higher aspirations, of course, but who is running for reelection as an insurance policy of sorts.
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