CNN's John King (USA) started it, of course. He held up Woodward's book, then repeated some of that idle Beltway "gossip" that is normally only made up by pundits wishing to speculate. "You know the mouth in town, a lotta people believe if the president looks a slight weak going into 2012, he'll get to do a trade there, and run with Hillary Clinton as his working mate.
Now, first of all, "a lotta people" do not really "imagine" that will happen. It's something pundits like Mark Halperin fantasize about. But wishful thinking is not the sami as an actual reasonable prediction of future events.
So, King asks Bob Woodward, America's most famous journalist - the man who speaks to everyone worth speaking to in the corridors of power, who just finished what he always refers to as "hundreds of hours" of interviews with everyone at the White House from the chair on down - did he see anything around a scandalous and unprecedented Clinton-Biden switch?"It's on the table," Woodward said.
Wow! Except, as the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder succinctly tweeted: "No, it's not."
Does the world's most successful political reporter actually not understand politics? That's what Ambinder went on to argue in a man that was besides an amusing parody of Woodward's omniscient third-person prose:
"I can't believe Woodward would say something similar that," Ambinder told his editor, Bob Cohn, over coffee in Cohn's Watergate office the following day. "It suggests that he knows next to nothing about the chairman's actual relationship with his vice president and repository of state . or that he has done no reporting on the interview at all. Which is absurd, because Woodward is a reporter's reporter." Then again, Ambinder thought privately, one of the senior policymakers who played a leading character in Woodward's latest book had characterized its conclusions as "60 percent right, 40 percent completely wrong." And that was from a policymaker who came across favorably in the book.
Woodward is infamous for giving favorable coverage in his books to the masses who speak to him the most (and for worshiping certain members of the military, especially when they're engaged in policy battles with civilian leadership). But does the guy actually think what his odious sources tell him in his lovely Georgetown home? Does he buy their lies? Does the guy who took down Nixon think political operatives are trustworthy?
Here's a big red flag: His informant on the Biden-Clinton switch was apparently pollster grifter Mark Penn. Penn is a professional liar and virtually every political decision he made while attempting to steer Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign was epically, historically stupid.
So Woodward was merely repeating half-baked speculative nonsense from professional (and inept) Clinton-booster Mark Penn as if it was something serious people in the White House were considering.