Bob Woodward is so butthurt that the Obama administration limited his access and made him irrelevant that he’s no longer making any pretense about political neutrality or journalistic objectivity. He’s gone at least half-Breitbart.
When it was conceived and enacted, the Sequester had two main objectives. The first was to bail Speaker Boehner out of a jam after he discovered to his dismay that this own caucus would not accept the deal he had negotiated with the White House. That meant that he had no plan for avoiding a default on our debt. He needed some trigger that would assure his mouth-breathers that actual cuts would eventually happen.
The second objective of the Sequester was to assure Democrats that actual revenue would eventually happen, and that is the reason that the Supercommittee was created. It’s job was to come up with a mix of spending cuts and new revenues. That was the entire point.
To say that the White House created the Sequester is narrowly true, but only because they had to find a way to avoid a default, and Boehner was out of ideas. It was his caucus that was forcing the default, so it is more accurate to say that the Republicans forced the White House to improvise, and the Sequester was their solution.
To say that Jack Lew told a falsehood to the Senate Finance Committee when he explained this, is journalistic malpractice on Woodward’s part.
To accuse the president of shifting the goal posts by asking for revenue is to contradict Woodward’s own previous reporting, and even the internal logic of last night’s piece.
All this does is prove the White House prescient when they decided to treat Woodward like any other journalist rather than some kind of saint.