The veteran journalist's "The Price of Politics" chronicles the inside story of how Obama and the US Congress tried, and failed, to restore the American economy and set it on a course to fiscal stability. It spans the three and a half tumultuous years beginning just before Obama's inauguration in early 2009 and lasting through the summer of 2012.
The book, published by Simon & Schuster, examines the struggle between Obama and the US Congress to manage federal spending and tax policy. More than half the book focuses on the intense 44-day crisis in June and July 2011 when the US came to the brink of a potentially catastrophic default on its debt.
Woodward pierces the secretive world of Washington policymaking with a close-up story crafted from meeting notes, documents, working papers and interviews with key players, including Obama and House Speaker John Boehner.
"The debt limit crisis was a time of peril for the US, its economy and its place in the global financial order. When you examine the record in depth, you cannot help but conclude that neither President Obama nor Speaker Boehner handled it particularly well," he writes.
"Despite their evolving personal relationship, neither was able to transcend their fixed partisan convictions and dogmas. Rather than fixing the problem, they postponed it."
According to Woodward, it is a fact that Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition.
"But presidents work their will - or should work their will - on the important matters of national business. Presidents Reagan and Clinton largely worked their will.
"Obama has not. The mission of stabilising and improving the economy is incomplete," he writes.
Woodward, who has shared two Pulitzer Prizes - first for The Washington Post's coverage of the Watergate scandal, and later for coverage of the 9/11 attacks, argues that as Obama and Boehner struggled through the most intense moments of the crisis, each contended with powerful conflicts in his own party.
His book shows why the grand bargain was never reached, and how the president, the speaker and the Congress settled for stopgap measures that delayed any serious deficit reduction until 2013.
With extensive documentation and firsthand accounts, Woodward reveals how the broken relationship between the White House and Capitol Hill drove the US economy to the edge of the fiscal cliff, where it remains.
