President Obama, groping for a new strategy after the Massachusetts defeat, seemed to find the perfect foundation for one Friday: direct engagement with the GOP in front of a national TV audience.
In a lively Q-and-A with House Republicans at their annual retreat in Baltimore, Obama showcased the campaign skills that won him the Oval Office – he was cerebral, combative, cool and quick.
And he was also able to forcefully express his strongest political and policy argument: that Republicans have little authentic interest in compromise.
“I don’t believe the American people want us to focus on our job security... I don’t think they want more gridlock. I don’t think they want more partisanship,” he said.“They didn’t send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of steel-cage match to see who comes out alive.”
Obama is getting the blame for much of what ails Washington these days, including the partisan feuding. What his advisers are trying to do - first with the State of the Union and more dramatically with Friday's event - is make clear that he wants to work with Republicans and that the minority party deserves blame, too.
By that measure, Friday’s event was a home run. It also showed Obama’s determination to ditch a Rose Garden strategy that pinned him down, month after month, in fruitless White House wrangling over heath care.
Expect more of Friday’s Obama, his aides say, with the president out on the road, liberated from messy legislative process, taking scores of questions from friends and foes.
Expect monthly meetings with Republican leaders.
Expect a campaign.
Friday’s session ran the gamut from testy to clubby, with Obama mocking Republican critics for labeling him “a Bolshevik” – then breaking off from an intense debate over health care to ask a young GOP congressman if his wife and children were in the audience.
“Is this your crew right here, by the way?” Obama asked.
Obama’s top aides were delighted with the performance, believing the encounter – as much as any other public appearance recently — contrasted his willingness to compromise with the GOP’s posture of recalcitrance.
“It was illuminating,” said White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton. “It definitely gives people a fair idea of how the president [and Congressional Republicans] interact privately. It really gave people a window into how that conversation goes.”
Many Democrats staffers, mesmerized by an hour of political theater in their Hill offices, were thrilled by what they saw.
“He kicked their asses,” said a Democratic Senate aide. “He went in there and made them look like petty, little politicians.”
A top GOP House aide called it a “draw” – and said that his party’s willingness to hear Obama deprived Democrats of “all that Party-of-No bull——.”
White House officials said that Obama did virtually nothing to prepare for the showdown, apart from quickly checking in with Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag to make sure he had his numbers straight.
He also took along legislative affairs director Phil Schiliro to help gauge which members were likely to pepper him with questions.
But this was no chance encounter. When Obama spoke at the GOP conference last year, the cameras were present for only his speech and were ushered out during the question-and-answer period.
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