The Price of Politics

I’ve really enjoyed Woodward’s first book on the Obama presidency “Obama’s War”. I came out of it with the idea that Obama is (and I’m quoting my 5-stars review of the book) “a thoughtful leader who is engaged with the issue, familiar with the details (does his homework), open to different opinions, and doesn’t want to micro-manage”. The Obama in this book seems like a completely different person. Many times in the book, it’s stated that “there’s no one is leading in the White House”, “They didn’t have a Plan-B”, and “He (Obama) didn’t offer anything”.
Maybe the first book was wrong and this one is right?
I kept reading and found how many details and how accurate are the descriptions of the meetings in the White House and among its staff. On the other hand, there are very little (in comparison) details on how the Republicans operated. All the details about that came directly from interviews with named staff members, implying that this is how they thought rather than what actually happened.
This is how the book comes off as biased towards the republican’s point of view.
Woodward doesn’t do a good job in following the time line of the events. There are a lot of gaps and it seems selective sometimes.
But he does a terrible job in explaining what any of the proposals actually mean. It’s a lot of Washington talk and acronyms briefly explained once with not a lot of details all the time. Because they are so many proposals that are changing all the time, it’s impossible to keep track of what is what.
One thing you can take away from this book very clearly is John Boehner is not on the wave length as Eric Cantor who is clearly going for Boehner’s job at some point. It seemed to me that Boehner wanted to get a deal but Cantor didn’t.
Still, for any political junkie, this is a Woodward book and it’s an election year. This is on any body’s top 5 list for now.