“

…[Jonathon] Alter, who describes the White House’s open hostility to Fox as a ham-handed error, also portrays Murdoch as visibly embarassed by Roger Ailes — though this may just be White House officials projecting. He writes that (apparently according to Axelrod) Ailes told Axelrod he views Obama as a “dangerous radical.”


“The conversation reminded Axelrod of the days when people thought fluoridated water was some kind of evil plot,”

”

Politico 

Secrets From Inside the Obama War Room

newsweek:

Alter’s new book, The Promise, is out soon, and has some nice bits on Obama, Year One. An excerpt: 

The first of 10 “AFPAK” meetings came on Sept. 13, when the president gathered 16 advisers in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. This was to be the most methodical national-security decision in a generation. Deputy national-security adviser Tom Donilon had commissioned research that backed up an astonishing historical truth: neither the Vietnam War nor the Iraq War featured any key meetings where all the issues and assumptions were discussed by policymakers. In both cases the United States was sucked into war inch by inch.

The Obama administration was determined to change that. “For the past eight years, whatever the military asked for, they got,” Obama explained later. “My job was to slow things down.” The president had something precious in modern crisis management: time. “I had to put up with the ‘dithering’ arguments from Dick Cheney or others,” Obama said. “But as long as I wasn’t shaken by the political chatter, I had the time to work through all these issues and ask a bunch of tough questions and force people to sharpen their pencils until we arrived at the best possible solution.”


See more here.

“Another reason I’m positive you [Michael Wolff] haven’t actually read my book is that you obviously didn’t read Newsweek before your last column because you failed to notice that Anna Quindlen left the magazine ages ago, so she can’t be fired. I’ve been called a lot worse than pompous, Michael, so I have no problem with that. But I can’t help thinking that there’s a connection between your barren and ugly mind and the fact that no one reads your site. Oh, and pushing it into everyone’s mailbox unasked doesn’t count. It just pisses people off that they have to delete it every day.”

Jonathan Alter vs. Michael Wolff 

gawker 

say what you will but I love this kinda stuff

“Who would really want this job for more than one term?” [Pres. Obama] Then added: “But I have to run now, otherwise it’ll mean letting someone like Mitt Romney step in and get credit for the good stuff that happens after we’ve been through all this crap.”

Around Thanksgiving, when [economic] frustrations were piling up, Mr. Alter reports, the president said to an old friend.

from NYTimes via Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter’s new Obama book “The Promise”