President Obama is playing a game of post-election chicken with congressional Republicans.
He is refusing to blink and trying to stare down the party that won a blowout midterm election victory that was supposed to force the two sides to re-evaluate how to work with each other.
Rather than conclude that it’s necessary to change course after voters inflicted devastating losses on Democrats, Obama is claiming a mandate for executive action.
His rationale is that two thirds of voters stayed home, so the landslide against him at the ballot box almost doesn’t count. The president says voters didn’t bother to vote because Washington hadn’t gotten anything done.
Republican leaders’ primary objective at a White House lunch with Obama on Friday was to convince him that ignoring their concerns and using executive action to reform immigration would kill all hope of compromise before the next Congress convenes in January.
Even some of Obama’s allies wonder why the president doesn’t change tactics.
“It seems like the president is trying to act like the election either didn’t happen or isn’t that big of a deal,” conceded a veteran Democratic strategist with close ties to the White House. “I think he at least needs to look like he’s doing something, anything, differently. We lost. Own it. Shake things up.”
After a meeting lasting more than two hours at the White House Friday, dominated by talk of immigration, participants on both sides emerged unmoved by the other side’s arguments.
“I’m sorry to say it seemed to fall on deaf ears,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said of the president’s reaction to Republican pleas.
“I don’t know why he would want to sabotage his last two years as president by doing something this provocative,” the Texan added.
Obama’s position is simple: either Republicans take up the Senate-passed immigration bill or he will move forward on his own.
A growing number of Republicans say they should be given the space to pursue reforms piecemeal, saying complete GOP control of Congress gives them a new incentive to pass some form of legislation.
“It was basically all for show,” complained one GOP aide whose boss participated in the meeting. “There was no real sense that he was listening to any of the complaints in the room. He’s already made up his mind on what he’s going to do. That’s clear.”
Of the bipartisan issues broached by the president, most were topics on which Republicans and Democrats have little choice but to find a solution: additional spending on the campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, more funding to eliminate Ebola in West Africa, and a budget for the rest of the fiscal year.
Obama’s stubbornness is partly driven by the fact that he does not have to win election again. His closest advisers don’t hide that he is now focused on his legacy, and immigration reform is the issue he most regrets not tackling.
In their view, a Democratic president who reforms healthcare and immigration will get deserved credit, not matter how low his party’s standing has temporarily fallen.
“The principles that we’re fighting for, the things that motivate me every single day and motivate my staff every day — those things aren’t going to change,” Obama said in a press conference that lacked the introspection of his speech following losses in the 2010 midterms.
“And I maybe have a naïve confidence,” he added, “that if we continue to focus on the American people, and not on our own ambitions or image or various concerns like that, that at the end of the day, when I look back, I’m going to be able to say the American people are better off than they were before I was president.”
