Obama’s new tactic: Don’t back down

By Clarence Page

Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2014 | 2 a.m.

With only two years left in his final term — and after a stinging rebuke to his party in the midterm elections, the president is showing a new attitude: No more Mr. Nice Guy.

First he threw down a challenge on the immigration issue. After years of setbacks and delays, Obama boldly vowed to take executive action to protect as many as 6 million undocumented immigrants from fear of deportation.

He welcomed Congress to replace his unilateral action with more comprehensive legislation of its own. But he’s moving ahead, he vowed, whether Congress does or not.

With that, Obama brought to center stage an issue that deeply divides Republicans — and at a time when Republicans hoped to push issues like trade agreements that divide Democrats.

But a few days later, while GOP leaders still fumed over his immigration vow, the president announced a new position on internet neutrality that leaned toward more government control — a position that Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, rejected as “Obamacare for the Internet.”

But that was mild compared to the apoplexy that Obama’s historic, new climate agreement deal with China brought the next day to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Soon to be the Senate Majority Leader, he hails from the coal state of Kentucky, where pols tend to treat human contributions to climate change as a myth. So much for bipartisan comity.

But if the president has given up hope for a break in Washington gridlock, he has ample reasons. Despite the willingness that McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner have expressed to maybe work across the aisle with Democrats in the new Congress, that’s not what Republican voters tell pollsters that they want to hear.

In language that must have been borrowed from tea party rallies, two-thirds of Republican and Republican-leaning independents voters polled by Pew Research Center after the midterms say the Grand Old Party’s leaders should “stand up” to Obama, “even if less gets done.”

Only 32 percent want to see the newly-elected GOP lawmakers work together if it means compromises that disappoint some of the party’s supporters.

By contrast, only 43 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said Obama should “stand up” to Republicans, even if it meant less productivity in Washington. Slightly more than half said Obama should try his best to work with Republican leaders even if it means compromise on issues that are important to Democratic groups.

Yet, even if Democrats are more interested in compromise than Republicans are, Obama has only two years left to accomplish something with Congress — after two years in which they seemed to accomplish almost nothing.

Republicans hope Obama overreaches but, considering the track record of their conservative wing, there’s just as much risk of overreaching from the GOP side, too.

While they are pressured to oppose Obama, the central theme of their midterm congressional campaigns, they also are caught in the GOP’s internal civil war.

Conservative extremists want to push for another government shutdown — and even talk of impeachment — to get what they want, GOP centrists want to show that they can govern without selling out their conservative principles.

Obama wants to show that he, too, can govern, despite relentless GOP attempts to show that he can’t. In his first post-midterm news conference, he said he was going to “squeeze every last little bit of opportunity to help make this world a better place over these last two years.” Now we’re discovering what he meant. Whatever tools he has, he’s going to use them while he can.

What does this mean for the Obama legacy, which surely must be on his mind?

Win or lose, say his associates, he has helped to change the terms of national political debate in a liberal-progressive direction.

Future presidential candidates will have to be “pro-immigration, pro-same-sex marriage, pro-economic fairness,” said White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, who also predicted “a world where no climate denier will ever be president again.”

Maybe. Grand predictions often have a way of falling into dust in American politics. Yet it is hard to deny that Obama has had a profound impact on the way we Americans talk about politics. You can hear it in the boldness of his actions and the ferocity of his opposition.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.