Christopher Anderson

On Tuesday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith spoke with Christopher Anderson, author of Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage, and wondered: "I’m starting to read this book and there’s a lot of quotation marks....I wonder, sometimes – this one to me feels like it’s on a little thin ice. Why is that?"

The book focused on some difficult moments in the Obama marriage, as Anderson explained: "And I have to say that it’s very interesting because the strains in their marriage, they’ve been very open about. During the period when he was in the Senate, the state Senate, in Illinois, he said it was a dark time in their marriage. He was angry all the time." Smith responded: "But these – here’s what – it’s disconcerting to me because as I started to read this and all these quotation marks, I felt, well, this reads – this looks more like a novel than nonfiction."

In contrast, Smith was not at all skeptical when discussing a tell-all book about President George W. Bush by former press secretary Scott McClellan. On the May 29, 2008 Early Show Smith proclaimed that the memoir, which claimed the Bush administration lied about the Iraq War, "actually confirms what a lot of people have come to believe, though, about the Bush Administration, that truth was secondary to policy and politics."