President Obama is turning the screws.
Two weeks out from his historic inauguration and promises of a new, less partisan Washington, but with his stimulus plan taking a very public beating at the hands of minority Republicans on Capitol Hill, the president has been forced to transform.
And quickly.
The Great Diffuser of inclusion and charm first shifted to the Great Salesman of Stimulus. Over the past 24 hours, he has been forced to become the much more stern Man With the Mandate.
Obama has begun pushing back hard after Republicans — a number of whom he has wooed during White House cocktail and Super Bowl parties — have spent this week making political hay out of his nearly trillion-dollar plan to revive the economy with government-funded jobs and tax cuts.
It may be working: Senate Democratic leaders said Thursday that they have enough votes to pass the plan.
Forget The Charm Offensive
Most dramatically, the president has been pointedly reminding Republicans, and some stimulus-skeptical Democrats, that he was the choice of the American people last November. Those voters, he asserts, rejected the GOP way of doing things.
"In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of [the stimulus plan] that echo the failed theories that led us into this crisis," Obama wrote in an opinion piece published Thursday in The Washington Post.
Those theories, he said, include embracing tax cuts as an economic panacea and turning a blind eye to issues from energy to health care.
"I reject those theories," Obama said, "and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change." His assertion had echoes of George W. Bush two days after his re-election in a 2004 squeaker over Democratic Sen. John Kerry.
Said President Bush, "The people made it clear what they wanted. I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it."
Obama until recent days had avoided displays of triumphalism or any suggestions of Bush-like claims to a mandate, even with the Democrats in firm control of both the Senate and the House. But his charm offensive failed to produce even a single Republican vote in support of the House version of his stimulus measure that passed last week.
And when even moderate Senate Republicans --and up to a dozen Democrats — began expressing public squeamishness about the plan's price tag and some longer-term objectives that don't translate into immediate job creation, the president shifted gears.
Thursday's assertion of the voters' mandate marked the third time the president has invoked the November election results. He also plans to hold a prime-time news conference Monday to again bring his argument to the nation's living rooms.
And The Washington Post reported this morning that Obama told Senate Democrats at a retreat Wednesday that he is considering using the bully pulpit of an Oval Office address to bring his economic message to the people.
Corralling Skittish Factions
The president has also continued his push to corral factions that have emerged during the Senate debate this week on the stimulus measure: from nervous Democrats to potentially convincible moderate Republicans and even his former rival for the White House, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain.
Obama has focused much of his attention on moderate Republicans who in the past have broken with their own on some measures promoted by Democrats.
If Obama and the party's Senate leaders, Harry Reid of Nevada and Richard Durbin of Illinois, can persuade all 56 of their fellow Democratic senators to vote for the measure, they would need just two Republicans to join them to get to the magic 60-vote threshold to pass the plan. The vote is expected before week's end.
(The plan could pass with a simple majority, but a 60-vote margin would ensure that opponents could not block it by raising a budget "point of order" allowed under Senate rules.)
That has turned the spotlight onto one small but highly important minority in the Senate: Maine's Senate delegation, Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.
Wednesday, Obama again used a high-profile White House invitation to bring Snowe and Collins, as well as Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, to the president's turf to discuss their push to cut billions from the plan. Nelson, among a group of Democrats who want the bill's price tag reduced, has said he wants to cut $50 billion out of the plan; Snowe has set $100 billion as her target.
Snowe emerged from the meeting saying that the president had made it clear "he wanted to get some Republicans."
But in a press conference Thursday afternoon, Reid warned that this faction of senators "cannot hold the president of the United States hostage. If they think they're going to rewrite this bill, they've got another thing coming."
Reid added, "I think we have the two votes necessary to pass" the plan.
Obama also reached out to McCain. The men spoke by phone, and McCain said Wednesday he appreciated the president's outreach.
But by Thursday morning McCain was on the Senate floor, offering an alternative stimulus bill with a price tag of $420 billion — half the cost of the president's plan and largely focused on tax cuts.
McCain followed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who had his own message.
"Action for the sake of action is always unwise," McConnell said, rattling off a list of projects in the plan that he found inappropriate, from money to "spruce up" federal office buildings to a measure that would remove catfish barriers in rivers.
"Yes, now is the time to act," he said, echoing the president's message of the past few days. But, McConnell added, "It's not the time to act foolishly."
Floor Fight
But even as the Republicans were laying out their objections on the Senate floor, Obama's emissaries in the Senate were working feverishly to craft cuts to the plan that would bring into the fold those skittish factions, from Snowe and Collins to Nelson and his cadre of Democratic colleagues. Sixteen senators — including five Republicans — were meeting privately Thursday morning to carve out a compromise. The GOP senators included Snowe, Collins and Florida's Mel Martinez.
And that prospect infuriated GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who from the Senate floor angrily declared that 16 senators "meeting in a corner" is "not how to do it." He dismissively referred to Obama as a nice guy with great potential.
Graham accused the bill's supporters of being "in a panic" because polls say Americans want a stimulus bill.
Durbin, who followed McCain to the Senate floor in the morning, pressed the issue by suggesting that opponents of the stimulus plan would find themselves linked to the "failed policies" of the Bush administration.
"Barack Obama has been president for two weeks and two days," Durbin said. "He did not create this economic crisis; he inherited it."
Then, with a flourish, Durbin ripped a page from the thick, printed copy of the stimulus plan — "President Obama's recovery plan for this country," he said — and held it aloft.
With a voice edging on sarcasm, Durbin said that Republican objections to the plan "account for one page of this bill."
It was part of the grand theater playing out Thursday in the Senate.
Watching from the sidelines were the American people, buffeted by a historically sick economy and wondering if either side's plan would stem the debilitating and increasingly scary slide.
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