Obama: From Uniter to Rock-Thrower

At Politico, Glenn Thrush and Reid J. Epstein neatly sum up the president's approach to Congress:

Picking a few choice fights “is a very good strategy if you know that applying all that pressure gets you the result you are looking for,” said former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, an adviser to Obama’s 2012 campaign. “But if you pick a fight, you have to be sure the tactic helps ensure the result you want rather than making it harder to achieve.”

There’s also a long-term strategy: Two months after a decisive presidential win, Obama and his party already are eyeing the 2014 midterms. Highlighting the contrasts between the White House and congressional Republicans could flip the House back to Democrats, giving Obama a final two-year governing majority that bookends the one he enjoyed during his first two years in office.

But it would be a mistake to attribute all of Obama’s actions to dispassionate tactics. After four-plus years of embittered partisan combat, he views his GOP bargaining partners with more than a little contempt, and he momentarily vanquished enemies who just can’t say “yes” to him.

His apparent conclusion, after watching the implosion of the House GOP’s effort to pass a modest tax increase before the final fiscal cliff deal, is that the best way to deal with the Capitol is to throw rocks at it — then send Vice President Joe Biden in to clean up the glass.

“There are 536 people who will be negotiating deals — the House, the Senate and the president,” an Obama aide said. “Only one of them isn’t running for reelection again. That gives us leverage.”

This last point is dubious.  Not two-thirds of senators and an unknown number of House members will not be seeking reelection in 2014.  And for those who are, opposing Obama may not carry much of a price.

Hagel and the Israel Gap

The Pew Research Center finds that Hagel's lukewarm attitude toward Israel may be a big problem with Republicans.

Attitudes toward Israel and the Palestinians have become more divided along partisan lines: In December, 70% of Republicans sympathized with more Israel, while just 2% sympathized more with the Palestinians and 7% said they sympathized with neither side.

About four-in-ten Democrats (41%) sympathized more with Israel and 13% sympathized with the Palestinians. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to volunteer that they sympathized with neither side in the conflict (15% vs. 7% of Republicans) and to offer no opinion (27% vs. 18%).

The 29-point partisan gap in the percentages sympathizing more with Israel is about the same as it has been in recent years. But differences were more modest a decade ago, and in 1978, shortly after the Israel-Egypt peace agreement, the gap was just five points.The differences have widened as Republican support for Israel has grown and Democratic opinion has been more stable. In December, 70% of Republicans sympathized more with Israel, compared with 56% in 2002 and 49% in 1978. Among Democrats, the most recent measure (41%) was little different from the percentage of Democrats who sympathized more with Israel in 2002 (37%) and 1978 (44%).

Conservative Republicans favor Israel 75-2% while liberal Democrats are much more closely divided, 33-22%.

Jim Brulte

The California GOP, which is in very tough shape, may soon have a highly skillful leader.  Jon Fleischman writes:

While he has not made a formal announcement of his candidacy, it has certainly been much talked about that Jim Brulte, the former leader of both Senate and Assembly Republicans, is seeking the Chairmanship of the California Republican Party. This is great news for the party, and for conservatives in California. I am very excited to endorse his candidacy, and will work hard not only to see that he is elected, but look forward to doing what I can to help make sure that under his leadership the CRP is successful.

Let me start out from the outset by making it very clear — Jim Brulte is a solid conservative. Whether you look at issues of taxation and regulation, freedom and liberty, the sanctity of human life, or the importance of the traditional family, Jim is a stalwart Republican. He firmly opposed Prop. 14 and believes in a strong, vibrant political party system. But you don’t have to take my word for it — he’s got a voting record well over a decade long to attest to his conservative credentials. When you talk with Jim, you will find that he does not believe that Republicans are losing market-share in California because of these policy positions, but rather how we communicate our positions, and of course how we engage in the science of politics.

In talking to many people about Brulte these last couple of months, I have had many tell me that they had heard that Brulte was a “moderate” — that his candidacy for party office would be about moving the party to the left. Hardly. As I explain to people, to know Jim Brulte is to know that it is, by and large, his temperament that is moderate. Jim typically does not get in people’s faces, and tends to be congenial and warm in his interactions with everyone with whom he deals. Jim is a listener, and is very considered about his decision-making. Now don’t get me wrong — Jim can be assertive when he needs to be. But it’s not because he’s flying off the handle, but rather it’s because he’s made a calculation that being more strident or direct in certain circumstances is what is needed or warranted. Perhaps my favorite example would be in in June of 2003, when as the Senate Republican Leader, he actually threatened to fund political mail against any member of his own caucus who went up on a tax increase. It was a bold move — probably meant to send a signal to then-Governor Davis and the Democrat legislative leadership as anything else.

Hagel Money

Chuck Hagel, a former lobbyist and senator, who has made controversial comments about Jews and gays, is apparently going to be President Obama's nominee for Secretary of Defense. The Center for Responsive Politics reports:

Hagel spent two terms as a senator. OpenSecrets.org data shows that he never picked up much support from any ideological group (and no significant amounts from pro-Israel groups) -- and also apparently had little to do with the defense industry, despite having served in the Army in Vietnam and earning a number of medals. He served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee rather than Armed Services.

Hagel's main source of support during his 12 years in office was the business world, with the insurance industry being his biggest backer (there's some logic there, with Omaha's reputation as an insurance town). The entire defense sector provided just $62,750 during his two terms. In fact, the only sector less financially supportive of Hagel than defense was labor. A breakdown of his support shows labor groups were responsible for just 2 percent of his PAC money and ideological groups for just 7 percent.

In 2002, the last year Hagel ran for reelection, he picked up just $1,000 from an individual in the foreign and defense policy interest area, and $46,500 from the defense/aerospace andmiscellaneous defense industries -- not much compared to the $278,000 he received from the insurance industry and $276,000 from the securities and investment industry, it seems like Hagel's closest friends on K Street might be those from Wall Street.

More on the Buffoons' Rebellion

A previous post described a Keystone Kops coup against Boehner. At the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore speaks with the Speaker:

Why has the president been such an immovable force when it comes to cutting spending? "Two reasons," Mr. Boehner says. "He's so ideological himself, and he's unwilling to take on the left wing of his own party." That reluctance explains why Mr. Obama originally agreed with the Boehner proposal to raise the retirement age for Medicare, the speaker says, but then "pulled back. He admitted in meetings that he couldn't sell things to his own members. But he didn't even want to try."

Mr. Boehner is frustrated that Republicans were portrayed by the press as dogmatic and unyielding in these talks. "I'm the guy who put revenues on the table the day after the election," he says. "And I'm the guy who put the [income] threshold at a million dollars. Then we agreed to let the rates go up, on dividends, capital gains as a way of trying to move them into a deal. . . . But we could never get him to step up," Mr. Boehner says with a shrug. Negotiations with the White House ended in stalemate when "it became painfully obvious that the president won't cut spending."

Once the talks broke down, the eventual scaled-back deal with no spending cuts was brokered by Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, with Mr. Boehner on the sidelines. He says that after the tax package passed the Senate, the House Republican caucus debated two alternatives. One was to amend the Senate bill by attaching spending cuts, and the other was to vote up or down on the Senate bill.

"We were already off the cliff," he says of the rushed Jan. 1 vote, and he feared that a no vote would do "serious damage to the economy." He denies twisting arms to win passage. Even though a majority of Republicans voted no, and he took flak from conservative groups as a sellout, "in the end, most of our members wanted this to pass, but they didn't want to vote for it."

Roll Call reports:

A concerted effort to unseat Speaker John A. Boehner was under way the day of his re-election to the position, but participants called it off 30 minutes before the House floor vote, CQ Roll Call has learned.

A group of disaffected conservatives had agreed to vote against the Ohio lawmaker if they could get at least 25 members to join the effort. But one member, whose identity could not be verified, rescinded his or her participation the morning of the vote, leaving the group one person short of its self-imposed 25-member threshold. Only 17 votes against Boehner were required to force a second ballot, but the group wanted to have insurance.

Even with 24 members, the group would easily have been able to force a second ballot round, but the effort was aborted in frenetic discussions on the House floor.

“There was an effort to get to a particular number,” said one Republican member who voted for Boehner but was familiar with the effort to oust him.

Republican Reps. Justin Amash of Michigan, Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina and Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho played key roles in organizing the plot. But participants describe its origin as organic and not led by any particular member, despite the suggestion by at least one House Republican that Amash was the ringleader.

Obama and Cable

Previous posts have discussed the Obama campaign's advantage in targeting television ads. Reuters reports:

As political experts assess Republican Mitt Romney's failed U.S. presidential bid, an analysis of how his campaign and President Barack Obama's winning team used cable TV to target ads at specific groups of voters may offer some valuable tips for the future.

During the final weeks before the Nov. 6 election, with polls showing a tight race, Obama's campaign exploited cable TV's diverse lineup to target women on channels such as Food Network and Lifetime and men on networks such as ESPN.

The Obama team used the fragmentation of cable TV's audience to its fullest advantage to target tailored messages to voters in battleground states.

Meanwhile, Romney's campaign relied on a more traditional mass saturation of broadcast TV. The Romney camp was entirely dark on cable TV for two of the campaign's last seven days.

...

 For instance, the Obama campaign identified zip codes surrounding Ohio tire-manufacturing plants and purchased cable ads touting Obama's efforts to block tire imports from China.

Obama ran 600,000 cable ads to the Romney's 300,000 around the nation during the campaign, said NCC's Kay. Obama's cable TV push started in April. Romney's began in September.

Obama's team also mixed and matched its messages to sharpen the appeal in key counties.

Regional Makeup of the GOP

At the Los Angeles Times, Paul West reports on the regional composition of the GOP:

"An increasing challenge for Northeastern Republicans, and West Coast Republicans, for that matter, is the growing perception among their constituents that the Republican Party is predominantly a Southern and rural party," said Dan Schnur, a former GOP campaign strategist who directs the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. "There's always been a political and cultural disconnect between the South and the rest of the country. But as the parties have sorted themselves out geographically over the last few decades, the size of that gap has increased."

To an unprecedented degree, today's Republican majority in the House is centered in the states of the old Confederacy. The GOP enjoys a 57-seat advantage across the 11-state region that stretches from Texas to Virginia.

Outside the South, however, it's a different story.

As a result of reapportionment and the 2012 election, the GOP no longer controls a majority of non-Southern congressional districts. In the last Congress, Republicans held a slim, two-district majority in non-Southern states; now Democrats have a 24-seat edge. Still, the Republicans have a comfortable 33-seat overall majority in the House — two seats are vacant — and only the most optimistic Democrats believe that Republicans will lose control of the chamber in 2014.