Via Spencer Ackerman and Matthew Yglesias, Russell Baker quotes this swami-like passage from Elisabeth Bumiller’s biography of George W. Bush in the New York Review of Books:

[Bush] had never met anyone like Rice. She could talk baseball, football, and foreign policy all at the same time, but she did not sound like an intellectual and she never made him feel inadequate or ignorant. On the contrary, Rice made Bush feel sharper, particularly when she complimented him on his questions. Bush did not know many black people well, and it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice. It was hard not to see that she was also attractive, athletic, and competitive, and, like him, underestimated for much of her adult life.

Yglesias’s reaction is to condemn Bush, but why should we trust Bumiller’s account? It reads like a Woodward-style attempt to project an omniscient understanding of her subjects’ thoughts. And while I’m sure she interviewed Rice extensively, there’s no way Bush or Rice told her that “it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice.”