At Barack Obama’s White House, the presidency and the president’s reelection campaign have merged. Totally. In the past, presidents have exploited their office to boost their reelection prospects. But never like this.
The weekly radio address from the White House, the presidential policy address, and the opening statement at a presidential press conference have been transformed into campaign tools. Though there’s nothing sacro-sanct about these events, they’ve never before been used in such a blatantly partisan way.
President George W. Bush didn’t do this while seeking reelection in 2004. Nor did other presidents, as best I can recall—with the possible exception of Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 (before my time). But for Obama, his reelection themes—attacking “millionaires and billionaires” and criticizing Republicans as cruel and uncaring—have become presidential talking points.
Presidents wear two hats, one presidential, the other partisan. When Obama called congressional Republicans and Democrats to the White House last week to discuss the debt limit, it was a presidential event. Afterwards, though participants weren’t supposed to reveal what had gone on, administration officials touted Obama’s supposedly commanding role in the talks in leaks to the media.
That was pretty much business as usual. In background briefings following a major event, White House aides routinely give reporters details of how brilliantly the president performed. This practice has been going on for decades.
When a president seeking reelection appears at a party fundraiser or a campaign rally, he plays a partisan role, both as a candidate and as the leader of his party. Obama, already an announced candidate for reelection with a growing campaign operation, has spoken at numerous fundraisers in recent months.
But the distinction between the presidential and the partisan in the Obama White House has not simply become fuzzy. It has vanished altogether. Take his April 16 Saturday radio address to the nation—a practice begun by President Reagan—in which he lambasted the “vision” of the Republican budget:
Three days earlier, Obama had delivered a speech on debt reduction that, in effect, superseded the official 2012 budget he had sent to Congress in February. The address was a classic presidential event with an invited audience.
Yet with Republican congressional leaders sitting in front of him, Obama launched into a brutally partisan bashing of their agenda. He included his “millionaires and billionaires” mantra, plus the suggestion the Republican budget is un-American. It “would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known, certainly in my lifetime,” he said.
With this speech, Obama crossed a line. A presidential address on a traditional subject, the annual budget, sounded like a stump speech in the heat of a campaign.
Then, at a White House press conference on June 29, Obama introduced a new issue, the tax break for corporate jet owners. This was the first Republicans had heard of it. Eliminating that particular tax loophole hadn’t been mentioned in the debt limit negotiations headed by Vice President Biden.
Not to be too finicky, but Obama cited it at the beginning of the session, before he had taken any questions from reporters. A president can’t dictate what he’s asked, but his statement is the equivalent of a briefer-than-usual presidential speech. In this case, Obama used it as a partisan weapon. Here’s part of what he said:
This is campaign palaver. Pigeonholing Republicans as defenders of the rich is Obama’s main reelection theme at the moment. And after raising it, he repeated it again and again in response to questions from the press.
There’s a downside for Obama in this all-consuming preoccupation with reelection. The distrust of him by Republicans could hardly become much deeper, but it has. They suspect his sudden intervention in the debt limit negotiations is designed more with his reelection in mind than with reaching an accord that Republicans in the House and Senate are likely to vote for.
And they were not assuaged to learn that one of the chief White House spinners these days is David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager in 2008 and now a senior presidential adviser. Plouffe spoke to a private media group the morning of last week’s summit.
But let’s not get carried away. That politics and reelection are obsessions of a president and his staff—that’s hardly unheard of. And the line between a president’s official and his partisan roles is not always bright. The roles sometimes come together. But never as they have with President Obama.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
