BreitbartNews interviews Ed Klein, author of "The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House"

The book has become a bestseller.  Ed Klein used to work at  Newsweek as well as at the NYTimes and has still managed not to become a full-fledged lefty zombie .... that's a real miracle.

....On Tuesday, against the backdrop of the Wisconsin recall election,     Breitbart News interviewed Ed Klein, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House. We discussed Klein’s own politics, his methods in researching his subject, and the reasons the mainstream media failed to vet the president when it first had the opportunity during the 2008 presidential campaign.


Breitbart News: You’ve encapsulated the Obama presidency in a memorable sentence in your introduction to the book: “We come to know a strange kind of politician, one who derives no joy from the cut and thrust of politics, but who clings to the narcissistic life of the presidency.” Was that your view of Barack Obama when you started your research?


Ed Klein: No, it was something I developed over the course of my research. I interviewed nearly two hundred people--many either present or former members of the Obama administration, from various departments, from both sides of the aisle. And it became very clear to me, from talking to all of these people, that here is a man who is temperamentally unsuited to the presidency. He loved the campaigning and the adulation on the hustings, but when it came to actually having to deal with the give-and-take of daily politics, he didn’t seem to have the skill set or even the will to do it. Unlike, say, Lyndon Johnson--who, by contrast, was not a good speaker, and didn’t speak well from the teleprompter, and didn’t have the charisma the way Barack Obama does. But Johnson knew where the levers of power in Washington lay, and he knew how to manipulate them. This president doesn’t know, and if he does, is not interested in soiling his hands with the day to day business of horse-trading, which is the basis of politics in any country............