It's hard to begrudge someone for promoting his book, but this Richard Wolffe article on the Daily Beast--plugging his new Obama book, Renegade--is pretty funny. In the article, Wolffe excerpts his book's accounts of two "confrontations" Obama had with Hillary Clinton and Jeremiah Wright during the campaign:
The exchanges were case studies in political psy-ops, Obama-style. He emerged with something less than success, and something more than failure. They were critical tests on his path to the presidency, and extraordinary examples of the personal strategies that are key to any president.
Or they were pretty standard run-ins that really don't tell us much at all about Obama--or his adversaries--except that their public bickering occurred in private, too. Also, if you emerge from a confrontation with "something less than success, and something more than failure," what do you really emerge with? Is it sort of like trying to return a defective TV to Best Buy and, instead of being given a refund, getting only store credit?
--Jason Zengerle