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Politico...
President
Obama bus tour brings out
fighting mood
By Glenn Thrush
8/17/11
Photo:
Reuters
ROCK
ISLAND, Ill. — During the debt
ceiling fight in mid-July, President Barack Obama threatened to take
his
message “to the American people” to leverage public support for his
positions
on entitlements, taxes and job creation against the GOP.
True
to his word, he’s been doing just
that all week, scorching a trail through three Midwestern states in a
big
armored black bus, raising the stakes in his running battle with
congressional
Republicans ahead of the looming deficit reduction fight this fall.
Republicans
have been quick to slam
Obama for campaigning from behind a taxpayer-funded presidential seal,
but the
bulk of his most bellicose remarks have been directed toward the Hill
GOP — a
demand for compromise in the most confrontational way possible.
On
Monday and Tuesday, Obama
repeatedly warned Republicans that they would pay the price for failing
to
agree to a budget compromise that included tax hikes on the rich. He
told an
audience in Decorah, Iowa, Monday, “When they come back in September,
they’re
going to have a wake-up call that says we need to move the country
forward.”
And
at all of his stops, Obama has
hammered House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) for “walking away” from
the
ambitious $4 trillion “grand bargain” that might have averted Standard
&
Poor’s credit downgrade this month, in hopes of pressuring the GOP into
a more
flexible bargaining position.
Blaming
Congress is a time-honored
practice of nearly every president on the skids. But the main reason
Obama is
negotiating from the podium is because he’s had so little leverage at
the
bargaining table.
This
is a president who has always
done better in front of a microphone than behind a closed congressional
door.
And his new stump speech, unveiled on the bus trip, bristles with
references to
all the terrible things that will befall lawmakers who buck the support
of the
public — and Obama — for high-end tax hikes and shielding most
entitlements.
“What
they need to do is come to
Decorah or go to Cannon Falls or meet with their constituents back home
and
hear the frustration and understand that people are sick and tired of
the
nonsense and the political games,” Obama said Monday.
At
best, this
compromise-through-combat approach is a low-percentage shot,
strategists in
both parties said.
The
reason? First, the GOP House
members he’s targeting are far more worried about a tea party challenge
from
their right than an angry Obama on their left.
Read
the rest of the story at Politico
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