NEW YORK TIMES Books: As a plethora of election-year polls and surveys indicate, Americans are fed up with a deeply dysfunctional Washington paralyzed by partisan gridlock and increasingly incapable of dealing with the daunting problems facing the nation: a White House plagued by infighting, disorganization and inconsistent leadership; a Republican Party bent on obstruction and increasingly beholden to its insurgent right wing; and a Congress riven by party rivalries, intraparty power struggles, petty turf wars and an inability to focus on long-term solutions instead of temporary Band-Aids…
Mr. Woodward provides a dramatic account of the angry phone call in which Mr. Boehner told Mr. Obama that the deal was off. Mr. Woodward writes that Rob Nabors, a White House official, remembers the usually cool president gripping the phone so tightly that it looked as if it might break, displaying what Mr. Woodward calls “a flash of pure fury.”…
“The Price of Politics” ends with similar editorializing. Mr. Woodward writes that “the debt-limit crisis was a time of peril for the United States, its economy and its place in the global financial order” and that “neither President Obama nor Speaker Boehner handled it particularly well,” unable to transcend “their fixed partisan convictions and dogmas.”… (more)
