Hutch Report: Bob Woodward Book Timing Hurts President Bush

Bob Woodward of Richard Nixon and Watergate fame has just released a new book in which he says many top officials in the Bush administration are in denial about the War in Iraq. Since the book is being released one month before a major election where Democrats hope to regain control of the US Senate and House of Representatives, there are going to be many political partisans who believe this new book is designed to hurt President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress.

I guess I am more cynical than most because I believe the timeliness of this book release is more related to money than it is to politics. The November congressional elections are topic number one on all the major newscast and in thousands of newspapers around the US. A book which examines the inter workings of the Bush administration when it comes to the War in Iraq will most likely find huge financial success if released only one month before a big election.

Bob Woodward has written other books and some of them have been favorable to the Bush administration and Woodward interviewed even President Bush himself for one of his books about the events of 911. While Bob Woodward does live in the fish bowl most folks refer to as Washington DC, he has found ways to work with both Republican and Democratic politicians over the years in his reporting for the Washington Post and for his various book projects.

There are big doubts as to what people at the top levels of government were thinking in the lead up, during the fighting and in the aftermath of the War in Iraq. For years, the American people were told one thing when it came to the reasoning for the war, but over time that reason has changed to something else which probably could not be sold to the American people even after the events of 911. There are folks who are trying to rewrite history and this time those folks are mainly Republicans who don’t want to lose political clout because of the failures of nation building in Iraq.

There may be a certain amount of politics involved in the October release of Bob Woodward’s new book, but I have no doubt that any political plus for the Democrats is far outweighed by the potential financial payoff for the book’s publishers. Over the next few weeks folks in the news media will micromanage all the details released in this new book and it will be interesting to see if Bob Woodward’s facts hold up to the kind a scrutiny the national media and political pundit’s on the right will put it under. While I enjoy reading what Woodward writes in the Post and in his books, he is certainly a much better writer than he is a communicator when he appears on interview TV shows promoting his various ventures.

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