Giving in to Democratic demands for a feistier leader, President Obama, the longtime king of compromise, has ditched the negotiating table and turned to the kind of partisan hardball he denounced as a candidate.
Obama came out swinging at Republicans this week with a plan to cut the long-term deficit and pay for his $447 billion American Jobs Act through massive tax hikes on the wealthy — a notion that liberals cheer and Republicans abhor.
To prove he wasn’t kidding, Obama threatened to veto any deficit-cutting plan that slashes entitlement benefits without generating new tax revenues. He also retracted his earlier concessions to congressional Republicans, including support for reforms in entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid that are a Republican priority.
Political analysts say the partisan shift by a president who pledged to change the way Washington works is a reaction to Republicans’ unwavering opposition to his proposals.
“Obama made a good faith effort to compromise, but in today’s Congress, there is little chance of success,” said Georgetown University politics professor Clyde Wilcox. “Now [he] is seeking to build support for his agenda. With an election coming up all presidents are starting to campaign by now.”
Obama last week visited a bridge that joined Ohio and Kentucky, the home states of his Republican antagonists, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and singled out the legislative leaders for blocking his jobs-creation proposals.
“Mr. Boehner, Mr. McConnell, help us rebuild this bridge,” Obama said near the banks of the Ohio River. “Help us rebuild America. Help us put this country back to work. Pass this jobs bill right away.”
Democrats have been clamoring for months for Obama to get tougher with Republicans, particularly during the recent debt ceiling debate that almost forced the government to default on its bills. Obama’s campaign aides said he decided against taking a harder line with Republicans at the time because the risk of a default was too great. With that crisis averted, they said, Obama is shifting strategies for dealing with his Capitol Hill nemeses.
“We no longer have … that direct threat [of a default] hanging over [us] like a sword of Damocles,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said.
Obama now is less concerned with reaching across the aisle and more focused on rallying his political base.
What he might have once condemned as “politics as usual,” he is now embracing in proposing legislation that advances a Democratic agenda without regard to whether it will pass Congress.
No one can really blame him, said John White, a politics professor at Catholic University.
“This is the only course that Obama can reasonably pursue,” said White, of Catholic University. “Since Republicans aren’t going to work with him anyway, this is simply an absolute necessity for the president to go to the country and basically work to frame the [debate].”
The shift could have harsh consequences. If the congressional supercommittee charged with finding trillions in long-term deficit cuts fails to agree on a compromise by December, that will automatically trigger a predetermined package of cuts that both parties oppose.
Without Obama playing chief mediator, the prospects of a compromise appear highly unlikely.
So be it, says Carney. No matter what, nothing is worse than the U.S. defaulting on its debt, he said.
