WASHINGTON—For weeks, President Barack Obama and his
top advisers have been meeting around the gleaming table in the
Roosevelt Room, debating what to include in the State of the Union
address that will double as the national opening of the president’s
re-election year.
Now, as they polish the final drafts, a key question
remains: how rough to be in attacking what Obama calls a “do-nothing
Congress” — the members of which will be arrayed in front of him as he
speaks Tuesday night.
Obama has experimented with different approaches over
the last year. At the height of the summer debt talks, he took a
collaborative approach and tried to strike a grand bargain with House
Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio. That effort fell apart, and Obama was
viewed as being on the losing end in the agreement that emerged.
The president followed with a jobs package that was
largely ignored by Congress but was better received by the public. Obama
spent much of the fall taking shots at lawmakers, complaining
frequently to crowds that Congress was more interested in politics than
what’s best for the country.
Polls showed two results: Some of the president’s populist ideas were popular with taxpayers, and Congress was not.
The challenge now for Obama is how to call out
Congress for not passing any of his major proposals to boost job growth
while still appearing open to compromise. Administration officials do
not want to foreclose the possibility that, even in an election year,
Republican lawmakers will be willing to work with them on some economic
policies.
At the White House, political guru David Plouffe and
like-minded colleagues think the chances of getting some Republican
cooperation before November’s election are small, but not too small to
pursue. The administration spin on that line is part of the message —
that Obama is ready to cooperate if only Republicans will work with him.
Plouffe points to 1996 and the work that Democratic
President Bill Clinton did with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the
Republican-led Congress. Clinton and Gingrich negotiated a reform of the
welfare system, a precursor to Clinton’s re-election that year.
One Obama adviser speculated that some Republicans in
the audience may be looking at their own campaigns and feeling a little
more open-minded than they did last year.
“You’ve got to think it would cross their minds, that
they need to deliver something on the economy before the end of the
year,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss
private strategy.
After months of listening to Obama bash Congress from
podiums all over the country, Republicans are more than a little
skeptical of the president’s commitment to collaboration.
“I’d like to hear the president say he’s willing to
work with us, work with Republicans and Democrats, on some of these
issues,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, a member
of the House GOP leadership team. “It’s been quite disappointing that he
talks about it, but actually being in D.C., working … we haven’t seen
that.”
Other Republican leaders have signaled they’re still
ready for a fight. Delivering the weekly GOP address Saturday, Rep. Jeb
Hensarling of Texas said Obama’s policies had worsened the economy. He
pointed in particular to the president’s decision a few days ago to
reject — at least for now — a permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
Republicans hope the pipeline decision will be a sensitive spot for
Obama, who is caught between environmentalists’ concerns about the
project and the thousands of jobs it would create.
Yet Republicans must be careful, many Democrats
believe. The GOP has a lot to lose by refusing to work with Obama on
anything, says Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is president
of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
“There’s a big risk for Republicans if they refuse to
do things to create the jobs that America needs right now,”
Villaraigosa said after a meeting with Obama in Washington last week.
“You see it already in their approval rating. People are just fed up and
they’re not going to put up with that.”
The policies Obama will propose in his speech have
been decided over the last few weeks in the Roosevelt Room sessions,
where top staff members wrestled with how to take the ideals the
president has laid out and “operationalize” them, in the words of one
adviser.
Not all of the proposals will be new, and they will
follow the themes Obama laid out in two earlier speeches. In early
December, in a Kansas town where President Theodore Roosevelt once spoke
of the need for economic fairness, Obama railed against the growing
income inequality in the U.S. and called for the prosperous to pay their
“fair share.”
In a video emailed to supporters Saturday, Obama said
his speech would “be a bookend to what I said in Kansas last month
about the central mission we have as a country, and my central focus as
president. And that’s rebuilding an economy where hard work pays off and
responsibility is rewarded — and an America where everybody gets a fair
shot, everyone does their fair share, and everybody plays by the same
set of rules.”
Obama also has harked back to the rhetorical
forerunner of the Kansas speech, the “New Foundation” address he
delivered at Georgetown University in the spring of 2009. In it, he said
the country must “lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity, a
foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one
where we save and invest, where we consume less at home and send more
exports abroad.”
With departing Chief of Staff William Daley at the
helm of crafting Obama’s third State of the Union address, the president
will talk about the specific steps the U.S. should take toward that
end. He is certain to renew his call for “a balanced approach” to
funding government, one that reduces deficits by cutting spending and
raising taxes on the affluent. Obama plans to offer new proposals aimed
at promoting college affordability and easing the housing crisis, and
will call for extension of the payroll tax cut.
When Obama is done laying out his plan, he will sell
it himself with a decidedly political tour of the country. A three-day
trip begins Wednesday and takes him to Iowa, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado
and Michigan — swing states that figure prominently in the president’s
re-election strategy.
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(Lisa Mascaro of the Washington bureau contributed to this report from Baltimore.)
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