President Barack Obama is changing his legislative strategy after an increasingly effective GOP leadership has blocked his efforts to expand government and boost tax bills.
Obama has invited roughly 12 of the 45 GOP senators to dinner at the D.C.’s Jefferson hotel on Wednesday, and he’s slated visit the GOP and Democratic caucuses in the House and Senate next Thursday.
That’s a sharp turnout for Obama, who has eschewed face-to-face persuasion with GOP and Democratic legislators since 2009.
It also marks a hiatus — and perhaps an end — to the crisis-talks strategy Obama adopted after the GOP took control of the House in 2011.
Since 2011, the president has used last-minute budget crisis talks to pressure the GOP to make concessions. The high-profile talks were designed to maximize media pressure on the GOP’s leaders, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Obama’s crisis strategy had partial successes in the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis and in the December 2012 “fiscal cliff” crisis. For example, Obama claimed he won a 10-year, $600 billion tax-increase on upper-income Americans in the December fight, but the GOP also permanently established the low middle-class tax-rates won by President George W. Bush in 2001.
The crisis-talks strategy failed this February, when GOP leaders shrugged off Obama’s pressure for another crisis meeting to stop the sequestration cuts of roughly 1 percent from 2013 federal spending.
As his high-pressure pitch failed in February, his poll ratings also tumbled, according to Gallup’s tracker. His post-election honeymoon bumped him up to 56 percent approval, but that score dipped back to 50 percent by late February, and even down to 46 percent in the first three days of March.
That approval rating is especially important, because it is a good indicator of his ability to sway the next election — the 2014 midterms. Without a high approval rating, there’s little chance that he can regain a House majority, and little reason for the House GOP to fear his threats or pass his legislative priorities.
But his new forays to the Hill, and the meetings with GOP senators, may increase his poll ratings, because swing-voting Americans want to see their leaders cooperating.
For that strategy to work, he needs to maximize media coverage of his meetings with GOP politicians.
The changed strategy may also allow him seduce and pressure a few senators and representatives to vote for his priorities.
Those priorities include new curbs on gun-rights, increased minimum-wages, free child-care for preschool kids and an immigration rewrite that could add more than 20 million Democratic-leaning immigrant voters to the rolls by 2030. They’re all popular among Democratic-leaning slices of the 2014 electorate, but are all unpopular among GOP voters because of their expense, or their impact on political trends, their expansion of government power, their damage to the economy, or their unpopularity among GOP voters.
In the Senate, for example, McConnell can use a united caucus of 45 GOP Senators to block bills,or force changes. But if just five of the 12 targeted GOP Senators switch sides in major votes, Senate Democrats will have 60 votes to push Obama’s priorities through the Senate and into the House.
None of the invited senators are in the Senate leadership.
Obama’s outreach will be aided by Obama’s allies, who will likely portray GOP party switchers as bipartisan leaders, and provide them with plenty of TV-airtime to boost their political visibility.
But the senators’ flexibility is limited by the prospect of primary defeats. Since 2009, tea party activists have retired several liberal-leaning GOP senators in Utah, Delaware and other states.
To boost the new Hill outreach strategy, Obama has also called several GOP Senators since last Friday, just after he scaled back his sequester-crisis strategy.
The senators who received phone calls from Obama include Maine Sen. Susan Collins, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, said a Mar. 5 report in the New York Times.
The calls also went to Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, both of whom are spearheading the Obama-backed immigration rewrite that would provide an amnesty to at least 11 million illegals, allow their relatives to join them in the United States, and open up a mechanism by which companies could import many low-skilled, medium-skilled and high-skilled workers.
Graham has also backed new curbs on guns, and has endorsed a so-called “grand bargain” hat would levy a new tax increase of $600 billion and cut popular entitlement programs. Graham is up for re-election in 2014.
So far, Graham faces no serious challenger in the party’s primary elections.
Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn also received a call, according to the New York Times. The newspaper did not mention any Obama call or a meeting with Sen. Marco Rubio, who is also trying to push through the immigration rewrite while preserving his conservative reputation with Republican advocates.
After the December crisis, Boehner said he would not take part in further crisis talks, but would instead rely on long-standing congressional rules.
Those rules require the Senate and House to draft their own bills and meet in conference to negotiate a compromise, without the White House’s direct participation.