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In the world of media giants, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward has reached a legendary status with few rivals. If there's a journalistic award to be won, Woodward has received it, including multiple Pulitzers. His Watergate coverage 40 years ago is, quite literally, the stuff of legend.
But even reporting icons sometimes make mistakes, some of them rather inexplicable.
Over the weekend, there was quite a kerfuffle when Woodward, to the delight of far-right bloggers, jumped into the debate over this week's sequestration cuts, challenging some of the White House's key assertions. For one thing, Woodward insists the sequester was President Obama's idea. For another, Woodward wants the public to believe Obama is "moving the goal posts" by expecting Democrats and Republicans to reach a compromise including both spending cuts and revenue from closed tax loopholes. As far as the Washington Post reporter in concerned, sequestration cuts were supposed to be replaced entirely with different spending cuts, just as GOP policymakers demand.
Let's take these one at a time. The first point, which Republicans and reporters find needlessly fascinating, is quickly becoming farcical. Tim Noah argued that the White House came up with the sequestration policy "in roughly the same sense that it was Charles Lindbergh's bad idea eight decades ago to fork over the equivalent in today's dollars of $840,000 to a German-born carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann.... The sequester was a ransom payment." Noam Scheiber added that saying the sequester was Obama's idea is "like saying it was your idea to give wallet to mugger when he said, 'Your money or your life.'"
Republicans were threatening to crash the economy on purpose and Obama was scrambling to satisfy their demands before GOP lawmakers pulled the trigger and shot the hostage (which is to say, shot us). The sequester then became part of the plan that Republicans proceeded to vote for and brag about, before they came up with the "this is all Obama's fault" talking point in the hopes of winning a bizarre public-relations fight.
After Republicans created a crisis, both sides created the sequester, and both sides now consider it dangerous. The point that matters, even if Very Serious People in Washington are reluctant to acknowledge it, is that only one side is prepared to compromise to resolve the problem.
Which leads us to Woodward's second, and more dramatic, error.
For the Washington Post legend, Obama is "moving the goal posts," since everyone realized in the summer of 2011 that the sequestration cuts were supposed to be replaced with a different set of cuts -- and no new revenue. It's unfair, Woodward argues, for the White House to suddenly expect a balanced compromise when that was never part of the original plan.
Woodward is plainly, demonstrably wrong. It's not a matter of opinion and it's not an answer found in a fuzzy gray area in which both sides have a credible claim.
When the Budget Control Act became law to end the Republicans' debt-ceiling crisis in 2011, a "super-committee" was created to find an alternative to the sequester. Was the committee's mandate to find a cuts-only policy? Of course not -- even Republicans accepted the fact that some revenue would be part of a solution. President Obama, when signing the BCA, explicitly said, "You can't close the deficit with just spending cuts.... It also means reforming our tax code so that the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations pay their fair share.'"
Brian Beutler added that Woodward "is just dead wrong."
Obama and Democrats have always insisted that a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher taxes replace sequestration. It's true that John Boehner wouldn't agree to include new taxes in the enforcement mechanism itself, and thus that the enforcement mechanism he and Obama settled upon -- sequestration -- is composed exclusively of spending cuts. But the entire purpose of an enforcement mechanism is to make sure that the enforcement mechanism is never triggered. The key question is what action it was designed to compel. And on that score, the Budget Control Act is unambiguous.
First: "Unless a joint committee bill achieving an amount greater than $1,200,000,000,000 in deficit reduction as provided in section 401(b)(3)(B)(i)(II) of the Budget Control Act of 2011 is enacted by January 15, 2012, the discretionary spending limits listed in section 251(c) shall be revised, and discretionary appropriations and direct spending shall be reduced."
Key words: "deficit reduction." Not "spending cuts." If Republicans wanted to make sure sequestration would be replaced with spending cuts only, that would have been the place to make a stand. Some of them certainly tried. But that's not what ultimately won the day. Instead the, law tasked the Super Committee with replacing sequestration with a different deficit reduction bill -- tax increases or no.
At a certain level, Woodward, despite having written extensively on the subject, seems somewhat confused about the specific details. In his op-ed, he wrote, "The final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester....So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts."
But that simply doesn't make any sense. The sequester didn't include revenue, so it's unfair to expect the sequester alternative to have revenue? Why is that, exactly?
What's especially troubling is that Woodward's own book is at odds with the argument he presented in the new op-ed.
But wait, it gets worse. Woodward, who for whatever reason doesn't seem to care for the president, made an unfortunate mistake and got caught. And if Woodward acknowledged his missteps and corrected them, it would have been easy to simply move on. Even journalistic legends make mistakes.
But in this case, after learning of the criticism, Woodward emailed Politico's Mike Allen with a defense that made matters worse, flubbing several key, basic details, suggesting he's even more confused about the debate than was evident from his mistaken op-ed.
Republicans seem thrilled with Woodward's errors because they reinforce the story they're eager to tell. But relying on mistakes to bolster a bad argument only makes Woodward and Republicans look worse.
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It is impossible these days to tell the difference between meme peddlers and journalists. I guess this is how low the 24 hour infotainment cycle has taken us. We expect this kind of nonsense out of Rush Limbaugh. After all he is a highly paid meme peddler, but Woodward has a reputation. I guess these days people will say anything for enough money. Would it be unfair to ask who pays Woodward's paycheck.
> I guess these days people will say anything for enough money.
And more exposure. Nothing gets one more exposure than slamming Obama / fellating the right-wingers.
good post -- small edit:
"but Woodward has a reputation." (insert "used to have" after "Woodward" and delete "has"
Woodward is just one of the journalist icons that have sold out. Tom Brokaw and Andrea Mitchell have also.
Tom Brokaw has ALWAYS been a front man for the corporately owned media and has NEVER been a journalist. Andrea (Mrs. Alan Greenspan) Mitchell has not been credible journalist for a very long time, because she has whitewashed her husband's major role in crashing the economy while never acknowledging it during her 'journalistic' appearances.
As for Woodward, does one major 'journalistic' coup 40 years ago provide an adequate excuse for talking out of his @ss for the last 30 years? Was it not really Bernstein who was the real journalist with Woodward grabbing credit?
Bob Woodward: the Republicans' Stenographer.
And I do think his career since Watergate does prove who the real journalist was on that team. Not him.
Woodward is a journalistic legend that led to me choosing this field right out of high school. I dreamed of being "Woodstein."
And during the Bush years, with those bizarrely fawning books (people made excuses for him, said it was done to preserve his "access"), he lost all my respect.
I did still get to meet my heros, on the big Watergate anniversary at BAM in Brooklyn, with Redford, Woodward, Bernstein, and the incomparable Brian Lehrer. That was a big day for me, esp. since, by then, I had written tosses to their hits while working at some other cable network.
And I did find Carl Bernstein *quite* charming in person, in a way I didn't expect, but perhaps the late Nora Ephron could easily explain. I enjoyed our short chat very much.
Woodward left me cold, just like his Bush books did. And then there are the rumors, you know? About the access he had with the CIA director book. About other reasons for having a connection to Deep Throat. I don't know that I believe them (that Woodward may have been connected or in the employ of a certain govt agency WHILE working at WashPo during Watergate. Even if it were ever true, I doubt it has been true for a long time now, but that does leave one with a lot of contacts who are on deep background).
And a certain affinity for the establishment that he's shown in his later career.
I'm starting to think it isn't about trading softpedaling and apologia for access at all. I think maybe he's a true believer.
After all, wouldn't he be trying to trade something for access to the inside of the Obama Adm. too, if he just wanted to be the guy who writes the inside access story on people in power?
Or maybe Obama Adm won't even consider giving him access, and he's pissed and powerful, and wants to spank them for excluding him.
The access game has corrupted journalism more than any other factor in the field, even mass layoffs of the most experienced people by corporate chain owners.
Woodward uses the style of empiricism, and in the Price of Politics, he presents his data and the hypothesis that the budget negotiations broke down due to lack of leadership on Obama's part.
To test the hypothesis, we see how Boehner does on a plan minus any input from Obama. We had this with Boehner's Plan B. Woodward's hypothesis fell flat, because if his hypothesis was correct, then Boehner would achieve success in his caucus minus the hypothesized Obama "lack of leadership" cause of the failure.
I would have expected Woodward to make some comment on this event since it did suggest he would have to modify his explanation or otherwise explain the anomalous event. Does he now want to say that half of the problem is Boehner's unruly caucus and half Obama's? It opens a rat's nest of other questions about Woodward's theory about the dynamics of the negotiation.
Occam's razor says the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. The simplest explanation is one the Tea Party has admitted to. They were and still are unwilling to compromise on revenue. Woodward should simply accept the explanation.
This doesn't mean he is a bad collector of data. It does suggest he may not be very good at constructing a hypothesis that accounts for the data he is collecting. There is no offense in this. Great experimental scientists collecting data are seldom great theoretical scientists. The two skill sets are different.
While I am wary of Woodward's conclusions, or assemblage of data into a story, I personally trust that Woodward has not falsified individual facts. I use other reporters like Suskind the same way.
Unfortunately true.
Woodward reminds me of McCain. His pushes his own rep and has been since Watergate.
If the President's defense is 'They made me do it', then we're going to need a bigger boat.
The very idea that we are talking about whose idea sequestration was demonstrates the willingness of modern "journalists" to allow themselves to be deceived by meme peddlers trying hard to deflect attention away from the conclusion that our legislative branch is utterly incapable of doing its job. It is poorly lead by careerists who lack both the vision and the integrity that used to be common among people who achieved high positions in the legislative branch. It is a story the media, including Bob (God I need access for my next book) Woodward, has ignored. If Woodward wants to type another book maybe he should focus on just how have we come to suffer the leaderless House and the constipated Senate? Alias I think such work is beyond the Watergate wonderkin.
Exactly right, Ron. The fact there's an argument over whose idea it was, is beyond absurd. Congress passed the bill, Obama signed it. Seems to me like the only ones entitled to complain or point fingers are the minority that voted in opposition.
Meanwhile, congress once again refuses to do its job.
And if the GOP's defense is 'It was the President's IDEA' then they are lying. First off, IT DOESN'T MATTER and secondly, if you want to know the REAL reason why the GOP embraced it is because 'sequestration' was a REPUBLICAN idea advanced by Gramm-Rudman in the 90's.
The idea of "fix the problem, not the blame" is foreign to the beltway insiders. I don't really care whose idea it was, I just want it fixed.
Oh dear, Bob seems not to realize the obvious - President Barack Obama just won an election using the exact rhetoric he is now using to make sense out of the sequestration nonsense! What goal posts have been moved?
Sequestration was a desperate move by a Republican party hell bent on a budgetary slash and burn mission, and not able to accept they could have had quite a bit from a President who was willing to give them much to save us hostages! They were definitely willing to shoot the hostage back then!
Why is Bob not perceiving such truth? -Kevo
Jeebus. There is no crisis. Freaking out over 2% just screams hubris. The citizens just took a 2% hit, and DC didn't care. Surely the smartest people in America can figure out a 2% reduction in expense without a reduction in service.
Shooter, here is the problem. Smart people can figure out how to cut 2% out of the budget. That is why we have a Congress with the power of the purse. We hope that our Congress is made up of smart people and who will actually, you know, cut the fat. In this case, Congress isn't deciding where to cut. They have just decided to use a meat axe instead of a scapel. They just aren't doing their job. Two percent or 20% makes no difference. As long as the cameras are rolling, our careerist preeners can't be bothered with doing their jobs.
@Shooter
You keep bringing up the 2% figure even though that number has been refuted any number of times. Why is this?
@ melopsittacus...
Because Pooper242 is not interested in real facts, only repuke/Fox lying points.
Ron, the only way to equitable cut taxes without getting sidetracked is across the board cuts. Each aspect of Govt can find 1.6% on it's own without incurring Armageddon or even a reduction of services.
My calculation is $1200 B cuts, $600 B new tax revenue, leaves $60 B/yr in cuts net. $60B is actually 1.6% of our budget of $3800 B. This is more hysterical than I suspected.
"Air Ball". Just call him "Air Ball".
@Shooter
Your calculations are wrong. You've been shown they are wrong, and yet you keep trotting them out.
1. It's ~100+ billion / year over 9 years. The cuts are cumulative.
2. Neither the $1 Trillion plus in spending cuts already agreed to by Obama, nor the $600 billion in extra revenue coming in thanks to the Jan. agreement count.
3. Large sections of the budget were roped off, which means it's more like a 5 - 10% cut to military and discretionary spending. -5 to -10% each and every year for the next 9 years.
Woodward probably has a few tax loopholes he doesn't want taken away. It's the only explanation when people of his stature fight so hard to get it wrong.
Watergate was 41 years ago, and Woodward was a young reporter. So was my grandpa, but now he forgets to put his pants on when he goes out to get the mail.
Time and technology have passed you by, Old Man.
Just yesterday Kelly Ayotte was claiming the American people are tired of the blame game... and yet there's John Boehner standing under a countdown clock labeled "Obamaquester".
If you're going to act like children, at least get your stories straight.
No...Kelly is tired of the 'blame REPUBLICANS game'. She has tied herself to the wrong Republicans.
Kelly may be tire of the blame the Republicans game, but I am tired of blame the Democrats, esp. the President game.
If they would all just stop pointing fingers and fix the problem! I really do think the President and the Dems are trying harder to fix the problem than the Republicans.
We may be tired of the blame game, but we're more tired of Republicans like Ayotte and Boehner claiming all Americans are on their side of this.
After all, when both sides play the blame game, one of them is correct. And we know which one.
Sometime in the past month or so C-SPAN aired a forum with the "New Hampshire 5" from late 2012 (after the election). Five women - two senators, two reps, and the governor, all Dems except Ayotte. I decided to "wiki" all five just to get an idea of their backgrounds. Ayotte was the only one who had any kind of scandal or black mark on her record, which were for actions taken by her office when she was NH Attorney General. Interesting.
See Section 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Ayotte
So I realize that Woodward is a "journalism icon" - and why. That iconography rests on ONE THING - Watergate. That is the be all and end all of Woodward's claim to being a journalism icon. One event. One report. Sorry but to this reader, that's not enough to qualify Woodward as the apex of Journalism. His reporting is sloppy, his writing pedantic, and his ego is overinflated. Put a fork in him -he's done.
You probably don't want to get into this at this point, but Hauptmann was probably innocent of the Lindbergh kidnapping. He had one of the most flawed trials of modern times.
To pretend that Obama wanted another deadline nightmare is the height of right wing projection. They gave the gipper seventeen clean debt ceiling hikes, and zero to Obama. Woodward should join FoxNews like Schoen and pretend to be honest and fair...
I don't believe that Reagan spent more money than all the other Presidents combined like Obama has.
Woodward 1 Benen Still 0
Obama got his tax hike on the filthy rotten stinking rich in January. (not to mention the ones he got on the rest of us) It is now time to cut. The cuts are not going to happen if we break it down to specifics because everyone in the government has their pet projects that they just have to keep feeding.
SEQUESTER now and quit whining like little babies.
Christ, just do it and get on with the next crisis.
C'mon Inspector, you are a better troll than this. Throwing in a canard does not change actual fact. I am inches from not responding to you like I do with Annie Oakley. Pick up your game, or simply choose topics you look less foolish trying to muddy the waters...
http://augmentedtrader.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/plot1.png
Obama did NOT spend more than very other president combined.
He didn't even outspend Bush and Clinton.
If you inflation-adjust the dollars, it's even less true.
Try to incorporate some sources that don't have shareholders.
Hey, Colon Inspector: remove head from ass before commenting, fool. I know that's where you do your best work, but please....
Sorry, Clouseau, you believe wrong.
National debt by closest fiscal year end:
09/30/1980 907,701,000,000.00
09/30/1988 2,602,337,712,041.16
Reagan almost tripled the national debt!
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo4.htm
Maybe it's time for Woodward to retire - he's starting down the road to senility. The fact is the "sequester" is NOT the President's fault, it's the fault of the GOTP that continually want everything their way and view "compromise" as a dirty word. The sad part is that all of the time & energy that's been spent by the GOTP on obstructionism could have been spent more productively seeking solutions, but then again - making the President look bad IS job one for the GOTP, not governing this nation!
Republicans are in for a rude awakening. Do they really think the public is buying what they're selling? Let's say all their prevarications were true -- so what if the sequester were entirely the President's idea? It's up to the GOP to come to the table to negotiate. So what if the goalposts were moved? It's up to the GOP to come to the table to negotiate. Everyone realizes Boehner is collecting a big, fat gub'mint paycheck but long ago abdicated his responsibility to earn it. Do Republicans really think the public missed that? Or that they're going to care what Bob Woodward has to say - or even at this point remember who Bob Woodward is? The GOP is dreaming if they think this will make a difference in the public perception of them as a toxic mess.
mistakes! Lies! what's the difference. The GOP mind should be studied like a rare disease. Aluminum tubes! Yellow cake from Niger. It's all the same. Let's protect the donors at all costs. Those pesky citizens just muck things up...
I'm not sure if Mr. Woodward can no longer do his job or if he's chosen not to.
I hope he recovers, he was great once and this saddens me.
I get it, Pulitzer prize winning journalists are only great if they agree with the extreme left wing of the democratic party.
You do neither Woodward, nor yourself, credit.
Noam Scheiber added that saying the sequester was Obama's idea is "like saying it was your idea to give wallet to mugger when he said, 'Your money or your life.'"
Agreed.
But it WAS Obama's idea.
He talked the mugger out of shooting us in the head.
When we deny that it was Obama's idea, we either come across as delusional or liars, and really, I thought that was the conservatives' specialty.
Can we PLEASE rather than deny that this reasonably shrewd master stroke of diplomacy was our president's work, instead use this type of defense? It was simply an idea presented under the most reckless self-inflicted duress the nation has ever faced. (With the possible exception of Condi Rice and Colin Powell's "mushroom cloud" blustering before the Iraq War)
Woodward was RIGHT about it being Obama's idea. His sin may have been the omission of very important context which made him a "useful fool".
The all-cuts-no-taxes part is worse, yes, but I'm more concerned about my allies getting the truth straight. The truth is all we got, folks. We don't have money, or media (despite conservative claims). The truth will win out, but only if we stand up for it even when it seems to serve us ill. Credibility should be our priority 1.
I agree with you in principle William, but the details matter. Obama et al proposed a sequester that had both cuts and revenue increases. Boehner et al countered with a sequester that was all spending cuts. Obama et al agreed, and then the specifics were worked out. All so that Congress would be forced to come up with a bipartisan deficit reduction deal. Except the Repubs aren't interested in bipartisan deals. They were "playing" that they would be able to gain the Senate and get rid of Obama (which looked pretty likely in the summer of 2011).
Republicans voted for sequestration because they believed that Romney would win the election, and all their dreams would come true, slashing medicare/medicaid, privatizing social security, repealing healthcare and cutting taxes for the rich. They were shell shocked when Romney lost. So now rather than come up with any smart ideas they just want to play the blame game.
I am concerned about the "hired guns" that the Kochs-Rove-FoxNews have in their employ. The number includes Limbaugh, Hannity, Megyn Kelly, and a host of other who speak the "fair and balanced" lingo.
What concerns me even more in the FoxNews "free speech" world is CENSORSHIP. With 80% of the media -- all media-- owned by a few .1%ers and much of the remaining 20% having been coopted by the "free speech" people, then opposing views are blocked. FoxNews censors or distorts Obama every chance it gets. In restaurants that have television on, the program on all day is FoxNews. Cable companies refuse to carry or will not put in its basic offerings "liberal" channels. When Al Gore sold Current TV to Al Jazeera, the head of Time-Warner cable said that he was going to drop the new channel from Time Warner.
What can be done to reverse the media concentration and the censorship?
What about our First Amendment rights?
Boycott cable. I have been boycotting cable for years, ever since Comcast refused to take Fox and all sports stations out of my cable package. Why should I be forced to have something as malevolent and pernicious as Fox in my home? If enough people boycott cable, it will reach critical mass and cable monopolies can be forced to change quite a few things. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon. People have much less money than they used to and TV is still a fairly cheap form of entertainment.
I seem to recall that Woodward wrote books slamming Bill Clinton, yet also wrote books gushing about Bush and Bush Jr.
And somehow he screwed up Plamegate because he said (I think it was Richard Armitage) outed Valerie Plame. I have never read any of his books except the Watergate one years ago. I read somewhere that he's a registered Republican.