Obama's blaming Congress tires Democrats
By MANU RAJU
9/8/11
politico.com
President Barack Obama spent much of the past month beating up on one of the country’s least popular institutions: the United States Congress.
This isn’t going over well with Democrats, who still run the Senate side of the Capitol and are tired of getting picked on by a president from their own party.
“It’s a point of great contention with the Democrats in Congress that feel like we’re doing an awful lot to support his agenda,” Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told POLITICO on Wednesday. “And it’s very discouraging, disheartening and it’s really not fair. He may just want to keep that up, but it doesn’t help his relations with the Democratic members of Congress at all.”
As he prepares to address a joint session of Congress on Thursday in a prime-time address on the slumping economy, Democrats on Capitol Hill are urging the president to pin the blame squarely on the Republicans who control the House and the powerful GOP Senate minority for the legislative gridlock that has paralyzed Washington.
Democrats hope Obama will repeat the themes from a more partisan Labor Day speech in Detroit in which he called on the congressional GOP to “put country before party.” But it’s not that easy for Obama, who faces a delicate balancing act: He must try to create a sharp contrast with his GOP adversaries without alienating them because he’ll need their support to pass an ambitious jobs agenda that could be critical for the economy and his reelection prospects.
In the past few weeks, Obama has blasted dysfunction in Congress, without explicitly pointing a finger at Republicans.
“If they don’t get it done, then we’ll be running against a Congress that’s not doing anything for the American people, and the choice will be very stark and will be very clear,” Obama said last month at Decorah, Iowa.
The Democratic senator from Iowa, Tom Harkin, isn’t too happy about that kind of rhetoric coming from the president.
“It’s not Congress’ fault,” he said sternly on Wednesday. “It’s the Republicans who were throwing up all these roadblocks, delaying things, objecting — not Congress. If he wants to be forthright and honest to the American people, he’s got to tell it like it is.”
The frustration has been percolating in Democratic circles for months. They argue that they carried the president’s agenda across the finish line for two years and now believe there’s greater urgency to shape public perception that Republicans are the ones blocking progress.
“I personally prefer for the president to create a bright line by defining who is opposing his policies to create jobs and move the country forward versus who is supporting him,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who is up for reelection next year. “But when you just say ‘Congress,’ you draw the whole institution together, that means both Houses and both parties when in fact that isn’t necessarily the case.”
The White House’s relationship with Democrats has grown increasingly strained as of late, as Obama has tried to cut a sweeping budget deal with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and as the president’s reelection campaign has begun to suck up cash from deep-pocketed donors who are also being courted by Senate Democratic officials.
After a speech at Johnson Controls in Holland, Mich., last month, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters that the president believed Republicans were the “source of the intransigence in this debate,” calling for bipartisan agreement on job creation measures and cutting the deficit.
But in that speech, Obama placed the blame on “partisan brinksmanship” in Congress for the unprecedented credit-rating downgrade by Standard & Poor’s.
“This downgrade you’ve been reading about could have been entirely avoided if there had been a willingness to compromise in Congress,” he said.
It’s not hard to understand why Obama is attacking Congress as a whole. A recent Gallup Poll found the institution’s approval rating at just 13 percent, while disapproval of Congress stood at an all-time high of 84 percent. This summer’s bitter fight over raising the debt ceiling that nearly caused default — after a battle that nearly shut down the government in April — lowered the public’s opinion of Washington and led to the historic S&P downgrade.
And until Obama has a clear GOP contender in his reelection race, making Congress his opponent allows the president to appear as if he’s not being overtly partisan and gives him the chance to pass the blame to the disliked body.
“I just don’t think it will [work],” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “I think the president owns the economy, and I think he owns the political problems associated with it.”
In a sense, the strategy is a throwback to Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign, when he ran against a “do-nothing” Congress and blamed Republicans for blocking a number of bills during a special session months before Election Day. The tactic succeeded for Truman, but back then Republicans were in control of both chambers of Congress.
Now, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said, Obama needs to single out a “hard-core group of Republicans who don’t want to sit down and negotiate.”
“He needs to challenge Congress to consider these problems and then be accurate as to where the problem areas are.”
But the president clearly sees an upside to divorcing himself from Congress: In several speeches during August, he tried to position himself on the side of widespread pubic dissatisfaction with Congress and Washington.
“And we’ve got a lot of construction workers that are out of work when the housing bubble went bust; and interest rates are low; and contractors are ready to come in on time, under budget. This is a great time for us to rebuild our roads and our bridges, and locks in the Mississippi, and our seaports and our airports,” he said at an event in Alpha, Ill. “We could be doing that right now, if Congress was willing to act.”
He said Congress could pass trade deals “right now” and a patent overhaul bill that “should be passed right now” and that “there’s no reason to wait.”
“I need you to send a message to your members of Congress, to your representatives that we’re tired of the games. We’re tired of the posturing. We don’t want more press releases. We want action,” he said.
In Iowa, Obama said voters “don’t have patience for the kind of shenanigans we’ve been seeing on Capitol Hill” and in Cannon Falls, Minn., he called on Congress to give tax credits for veterans.
“Congress needs to move,” he said.
As he traveled on Air Force One to Detroit this week for a Labor Day speech, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said he handed Obama a copy of a “give ’em hell” speech from Truman in 1948. In Obama’s speech, he did take a much stronger punch at Republicans.
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he was pleased with that speech, a message he conveyed personally to the president.
“I thought it was tremendous, and I hope he keeps that same pattern of speaking,” Reid said. “And he said he was going to. He said we’re in a new day here. And so I hope that’s the case.”
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