Does President Obama have a second-term strategy?

By GLENN THRUSH

A year ago – wrote Glenn Thrush in Politico – President Barack Obama jammed a prediction into his stump speech that evoked his 2008 hope-and-change message — a vow that a victory in 2012 would break the partisan “fever” in Washington.

But behind closed doors, people close to the president tell POLITICO, Obama never quite bought his own rhetoric and was quietly planning for precisely the opposite scenario, perpetual gridlock, during West Wing strategy sessions in the weeks before and after beating Mitt Romney.

Those clashing visions of the second term — the president’s public optimism, shadowed by his dour, private realism — have made the opening act of Obama II something of a muddle, with critics and allies alike wondering if the president has a coherent strategy for retaining influence during what promises to be 3½ maddening years of divided, even schizophrenic, government.

The fever didn’t break. It turned into smallpox,” joked one of Obama’s top 2012 campaign advisers.

“We normally see a president have about a year to 18 months in the second term to exercise his influence on the domestic front, … but that process has been greatly accelerated here,” said veteran presidential adviser David Gergen.

“Obama has 48 months as president, but six months in, the wind has already gone out of his sails.… The public has completely lost interest,” Gergen added.

“Just look at cable. That’s why they have embraced the Zimmerman trial.

“It must be very tough on [the White House] psychologically.”

That “fever” line was always bit of an eye-roller to the campaign’s senior aides, even as they dutifully recited it on the cable shows. But it was a necessary political fairy tale. Obama, a candidate who has always fed off the emotion of his supporters, needed a hopeful hook to motivate his less-than-fired-up troops and, at times, himself.

In the words of one aide, “Four more years of the same old s—t” wasn’t exactly going to cut it as a go-to aspirational message.

Days after the word “fever” popped out of candidate Obama’s mouth, the president and his top staff began plotting out what a second term might look like. Participants say much of the talk centered on a detailed plan to reshuffle the Cabinet and senior West Wing staff that ultimately resulted in chief of staff Jack Lew’s jump to Treasury and the selection of his replacement, Denis McDonough.

 

Obama’s team quickly concluded the House would remain in GOP hands — with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) still too weak to control his troops — and focused most of its energy on figuring out a way to target Republican senators on the tax and fiscal deals.

Less time was devoted to an overall theory of how Obama planned to govern.

What was discussed amounted to more of a shift in mind-set than a detailed game plan based, according to current and former Obama staffers, on a simple realization: The president couldn’t control the game as he did four years earlier — but he could be less ambitious and more opportunistic in how he played it, seeking moments of leverage amid all the Republican infighting.

The idea was to be flexible, smart and patient.

“I do not believe he [Obama] was too bullish on the fever breaking. I think there was a hope that it might break, but he’s just as realistic about the political situation as he was in 2010-2011,” said Jon Favreau, co-author of Obama’s optimistic 2012 second inaugural address, and his longtime top speechwriter.

“I don’t think he let himself kind of think that everything was going to be wonderful. Looking at the political landscape, and what could possibly change, he thought the one thing is that there’s an election — maybe they’ll take a look at their tactics and their decision not to take part in governing,” Favreau added. “But come on — this is basically the same group of people [House Republicans] who almost caused the nation to default on its debts.”

After the emotional high of his reelection dissipated, Obama convened his top advisers for a series of sober meetings in the West Wing to map out strategies for dealing with the fiscal cliff negotiations. Aides remember Obama’s mood changing, like a man returning from a vacation to find a ransacked house.

“Guys, I don’t want politics to be a limit of what you recommend to me,” Obama told senior aides David Plouffe, Lew, Dan Pfeiffer and Pete Rouse a couple of weeks after his reelection, according to a White House aide with direct knowledge of the meeting.

“Let’s come up with an agenda, then let’s figure it out from there as best we can,” he said, prodding them to adopt a more muscular approach to the use of executive power. “We can’t let the driving force of what we pass be Congress.”

The year started off on a relative high note: Obama wooed about a dozen Senate Republicans — the handful most alarmed by their party’s precipitous slide in national elections — and secured a landmark increase of taxes on the wealthy.

Then came bitter defeat on gun control, as he unsuccessfully sought to leverage outrage over the Newtown, Conn., school shooting into legislative action, and a series of humbling crises — Libya, the IRS and Justice Department controversies, the firestorm over the Edward Snowden leaks and NSA surveillance, and out-of-control events in Syria and Egypt.

The flexible strategy favored by Obama and his staff, however pragmatic, had one major drawback: It underscored the impression, fair or not, that the presidency was aging prematurely and that Obama was losing power at a time when most second-term presidents were most effective.

Source: politico.com 7/17/13

 

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