Don’t just take my word, ask a professional (or two). Dave Weigel explains “How Bob Woodward’s Book Debunks His Big Washington Post Op-Ed”:
Bob Woodward’s been banging the tables of various talk shows for weeks, making the same fairly banal point: The White House proposed sequestration as part of a package to raise the debt limit in 2011. Watching Woodward in action has been disconcerting for the many reporters who covered the story in real time. Did the White House float sequestration as a “trigger” to force a better, later deal from Congress? Yes. Would this have ever become an issue if Republicans hadn’t chosen to hogtie the debt limit and hold a sixgun to its head for six months? No. So who cares?
Banal, like I said, until Woodward’s Friday Washington Post column on the topic. The Post blasted this out to its news alert list with the subject “EXCLUSIVE: Obama Misled; He and Jack Lew Planted Seeds For Disastrous Sequester.” That cranked it up from banal to outright strange. First, Woodward’s been talking about Obama’s slippery denial of ownership of sequestration all year. Second, as Brian Beutler points out, Woodward himself gets the point of sequestration totally wrong…
To argue that the White House is “moving the goal posts” when it now asks for revenue in a sequestration replacement, you have to toss out the fact that the White House always wanted revenue in the supercommittee’s sequestration replacement. This isn’t confusing unless reporters make it confusing.
Here’s Ezra Klein, on those “moving goalposts”:
… The sequester was a punt. The point was to give both sides a face-saving way to raise the debt ceiling even though the tax issue was stopping them from agreeing to a deficit deal. The hope was that sometime between the day the sequester was signed into law (Aug. 2, 2011) and the day it was set to go into effect (Jan. 1, 2013), something would…change.
There were two candidates to drive that change. The first and least likely was the supercommittee. If they came to a deal that both sides accepted, they could replace the sequester. They failed.
The second was the 2012 election. If Republicans won, then that would pretty much settle it: No tax increases. If President Obama won, then that, too, would pretty much settle it: The American people would’ve voted for the guy who wants to cut the deficit by increasing taxes.
The American people voted for the guy who wants to cut the deficit by increasing taxes.