PD (and Walrus?) you might like or at least find this interesting:
The subtitle is a bit misleading, it's actually more like Woodwards'
The Agenda about the first year of Clinton's Presidency and that learning process only about Obama's first 18 months or so. Covering the internal battles over the stimulus, ACA, Dodd-Frank, etc.
The new president surrounded himself with a team of seasoned players—like Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner—who had served a different president in a different time. As the nation’s crises deepened, Obama’s deputies often ignored the president’s decisions—“to protect him from himself”—while they fought to seize control of a rudderless White House. Bitter disputes—between men and women, policy and politics—ruled the day. The result was an administration that found itself overtaken by events as, year to year, Obama struggled to grow into the world’s toughest job and, in desperation, take control of his own administration.
My favorite part was when Larry Summers was basically laying out an extensive list of demands that would render Obama a figurehead and make him essentially Prime Minister, also give him a limo and a driver or he'd bring the whole administration down, and Summers dropped his list of demands in exchange for two rounds of golf with Obama and a better seat at the State of the Union.
It portrays events mostly from the inside the White House/administration perspective, rather than talking about Congress, they're one of the "outsiders" so Pelosi, Grassley, etc. are all brought in more as the Obama team's reactions to what they're doing rather than a lot of, especially the ACA history, the Congressional debate. So it'll be more like "news came that Baucus had made this deal with health insurance companies, Rahm wanted to burn down his house, Orszag says it's not all bad maybe Obama could..., Summers interrupts and says no they should scrap this health care thing altogether, Obama nods and says he has to leave, they'll have another meeting next week and the week after and the week after and the week after to decide what to decide what to decide. Christina Romer wonders why nobody noticed she was in the room."
Also, a good part is where Obama is repeating everything Krugman writes in his column in regards to what should be done on the size of the stimulus. And it's rankling the insiders who want to keep making it smaller, so they schedule a dinner between Obama, Krugman and some others, and Krugman walks away thinking Obama agreed with him so he tones down his anti-Obama rhetoric for a while and all the White House people are high fiving each other because Obama's stopped repeating "Sweden, not Japan" in their meetings and is now willing to cut down the stimulus size since Krugman stopped harping on it in his column/blog.
One more anecdote, when Obama was giving his big health care speech to a joint session of Congress to save health care reform (the Joe Wilson "you lie!" speech) he wanted a rather extensive set of materials released to the press with the speech. Articles, studies, etc. to bolster his "plan" (which had been moved out of the speech) and Rahm had this all condensed into a two page talking points outline that was released instead. Orszag almost mentioned it to Obama on the eve of the speech and Rahm basically shot him a "I will fucking murder you here and now" look that shut him up.
Apparently nobody in the White House was disappointed when Rahm made the tough decision to leave to run for Mayor of Chicago...
