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Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
Based on eighteen months of reporting, Bob Woodward presents an intimate, documented examination of how President Obama and the highest profile Republican and Democratic leaders in the U.S. Congress attempted to restore the American economy and improve the federal government's fiscal condition over three and a half years. Providing verbatim, day-by-day accounts, Woodward shows what really happened, what drove the debates and struggles that continue to define the American future.
Zusammenfassung
The Price of Politics chronicles the inside story of how President Obama and the U.S. Congress tried, and failed, to restore the American economy and set it on a course to fiscal stability. It spans the three and a half tumultuous years beginning just before Obama's inauguration in early 2009 and lasting through the summer of 2012.
Woodward pierces the secretive world of Washington policymaking once again, with a close-up story crafted from meeting notes, documents, working papers and interviews with key players, including President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner.
At the center of The Price of Politics is a high-stakes personal and political struggle between the president and the speaker. The Price of Politics takes the reader through the electric 44 days during the summer of 2011 with day-by-day, often hour-by-hour, accounts as the two attempt a "grand bargain" to cut entitlement spending and increase tax revenue.
As they struggled through the most intense moments of the crisis, each contended with powerful conflicts in his own party. At the prospect of serious budget cuts, Obama told Woodward, "Our friends on the left would howl and act as if we had dismantled the New Deal." In the House, Boehner was looking over his shoulder, worrying that his second-in-command, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, was undermining him in concert with extreme conservative House members and others with ties to the anti-tax Tea Party. At the same time, Boehner described the president as "moaning and groaning and whining and demanding. Threatening. He was pretty desperate."
The Price of Politics shows why the grand bargain was never reached, and how the president, the speaker and the Congress settled for stopgap measures that delayed any serious deficit reduction until 2013.
With extensive documentation and firsthand accounts, Woodward reveals how the broken relationship between the White House and Capitol Hill drove the U.S. economy to the edge of the fiscal cliff, where it remains.
Rezensionen (3)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
Woodward critically examines the recent economic challenges that the nation has faced and limns the political shift from a rhetoric of togetherness to one of confrontation as Congress and the president have worked to resolve the debt crisis. Woodward zeroes in on the middle of 2011 and political battles that occurred as government officials struggled to prevent a massive shutdown. As he did in his previous examinations of the Bush administration, Woodward pulls no punches here and provides a fascinating history and analysis. Narrator Boyd Gaines boasts a commanding voice that proves suitable for the important issues covered. His deep, slightly raspy voice and deliberate narration will grab the listener's attention from the very start. But despite strong prose and a great performance, this abridged audio edition is likely to disappoint. Listeners may find themselves confused and struggling to keep up without some of the more important excised sections. A Simon & Schuster hardcover. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist-Rezension
Woodward's seventeenth book takes interested readers and they will need to be very interested behind closed doors to observe how the nation's debt crisis developed over the past three-and-a-half years. Copious interviews with major players in this stand-off between the president and congressional Republicans (more than 100 individuals, so the author states) led the author to prepare a you-are-there, fly-on-wall approach to detailing the struggle...to manage federal spending and tax policy. The specific focus, and subsequently a big chunk of the book,centers on the 44-day high-stakes negotiations between the two sides in June and July, 2011, a brutal haggling over raising the debt ceiling. The cast in this drama is huge, but of course President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner loom largest upon the stage. These two key players attempted to reach a grand bargain that would ease the crisis for some time to come. Woodward's purpose is to reveal how close they came and why an agreement failed. If readers are looking for an unbiased chronicle of these events, they better look elsewhere. Woodward appears to have walked into the writing of this book ready to lay most of the blame on the president. Some journalists in the know have reported that there is really nothing new here, but political junkies surely will read to the last page. For most readers, though, much of this will be TMI.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus-Rezension
A reconstruction of how Republican brinkmanship threatened to bring down the global economy by forcing a U.S. debt default. Pulitzer Prizewinning Washington Post editor Woodward (Obama's Wars, 2010, etc.) chronicles how Republicans used a previously routine vote on increasing the debt ceiling to blackmail President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. Emboldened by their midterm victory in 2010, the Republicans aimed to force the president to accept major cuts to the budget and entitlements while holding the line on taxes. In explaining this display of brinkmanship, Woodward explains that for the U.S. president, default was not an option and could in fact bring down the entire global economy. The action takes place in the summer of 2011, beginning with a failed attempt by the White House to craft a workable deal in negotiations with House Speaker John Boehner. When these negotiations collapsed, the entire political leadership of both parties was brought in, leading to recriminations on all sides. The debt ceiling was raised but at the cost of a January fiscal cliffhanger. Although the author faults both Boehner and the president for their "fixed partisan convictions and dogmas," his main purpose appears to be to discredit Obama. He compares him unfavorably to former Presidents Reagan and Clinton, both of whom handled similar crises. Although admitting that "Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition," Woodward faults him for being both arrogant and inept at building political consensus. An occasionally intriguing look into political grappling at the highest level but mostly an exercise in excruciating detail, most of which boils down to trivial political gossip.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.