President Obama is wading into congressional budget negotiations after months on the sidelines, setting himself up either as the voice of political reason if negotiations succeed or an easy target for blame if compromise fails and the government shuts down at midnight Friday. Obama this week summoned House and Senate leaders to the Oval Office for daily – sometimes twice-a-day – meetings to strong-arm them into a compromise on the current fiscal year’s $3.5 trillion budget.
By late Thursday, however, neither side had budged.
“We have bent and bent and bent as much as the president will let us bend,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Obama distanced himself from the budget standoff for months, as Congress repeatedly passed temporary funding measures that kept the government running for as little as two weeks at a time. And he had words just as hurtful to Democrats and Republicans when he publicly chastised gridlocked lawmakers to “act like grown-ups.”
With the prospect of a shutdown looming, Obama now appears to have as much at risk politically as the congressional Republicans who have been holding out for deeper cuts in federal spending.
“This is no-win for everybody involved,” said Steve Lombardo, a political consultant who worked on George H.W. Bush’s 1992 campaign. “Everybody is tarnished.”
Lombardo said a shutdown would weigh down Obama’s approval ratings while fracturing the Republican Party so the president can take no comfort in the fact that the 1995 government shutdown proved a boon for another Democratic president.
Back then, the budget fight was between then-President Clinton and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The arguments – hinging on health care funding and environmental controls – echoed today’s budget dispute, but Clinton was at the forefront of negotiations in contrast to Obama’s preferred position of “mediator.”
With the unpopular Gingrich as a foil, Clinton successfully pinned the blame for the 1995 shutdown on Republicans. His poll numbers rose while Gingrich was reduced to fodder for late-night talk show jeers.
It’s different this time around, said Peter Fenn, a political management professor at George Washington University.
“The implications of this shutdown would be much greater than in ’95,” Fenn said.
Obama’s late engagement in the budget standoff could make it trickier for him to duplicate Clinton’s success. Yet, Obama’s style worked before. The president successfully assumed the role of last-minute referee in December and won credit for wrangling a deal in Congress to extend the Bush-era tax cuts.
Moreover, Clinton didn’t have the Tea Party as a scapegoat, Fenn said. The conservative small-government movement helped elect many of the Republicans who now must vote on the budget and Tea Party members are demanding that the GOP keep its campaign pledge to cut deeply.
“Everybody loses with a shutdown … but I think the Tea Party is going to hurt the Republicans more,” Fenn said. “The Tea Party is the problem.”
Lombardo agreed, saying Democrats have successfully portrayed the Tea Party demands as the cause of the deadlock.
“Democrats have done a good job painting this shutdown, if it happens, as a byproduct of the Tea Party,” he said. “No Democrat on the Hill has opened their mouth on this issue and not uttered the words ‘Tea Party.'”
