Obama: Held Hostage No More?

The president signals that he’s done negotiating with the recalcitrant Republicans.

President Barack ObamaRingo H.W. Chiu/Xinhua/ZUMA Press

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


No more Mr. Nice Guy. That was President Barack Obama’s declaration at a morning press conference on Thursday. Though he didn’t put it in quite such a dramatic fashion.

The White House scheduled this presser so the president could once again call on Congress to pass the jobs bill he proposed last month. A Senate vote is due next week on the legislation (though one version of the bill could face a Senate vote as early as this afternoon), and Obama posed “a simple choice”: The US could either keep taxes for millionaires and billionaires at their current levels, or it could increase these taxes moderately to underwrite initiatives that will lead to jobs for teachers, construction workers, and others. This is not “class warfare,” he insisted. It’s a decision for the public to render.

This is largely what he’s been saying during a series of rallies he has held across the country—including in the congressional districts of the two top House Republicans, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). At the press conference, he was continuing the sales pitch.

Yet an interesting moment occurred toward the start, when Associated Press reporter Ben Feller asked whether it would be more “productive” for Obama to negotiate with the congressional Republicans than to mount a public campaign demanding passage of his American Jobs Act.

Obama, keeping his anger and frustration in check, replied that he has “gone out of my way”—often at his own political peril—to work with Republicans. He cited the most recent debt ceiling dance. The GOP, though, has responded with “games-playing” and has “preferred to score political points as opposed to getting something done.”

For much of the past year, Obama, while negotiating with the Republicans over first a budget agreement and then the debt ceiling, has generally refrained from slamming the GOP as an unreliable negotiating partner. That’s because Obama was mindful of the talks under way. It’s hard to forge a 12-year grand bargain over spending and taxes with the other side if you’re blasting away at your negotiating partners. At times, Obama poked at Republican recalcitrance. Yet it has not been a steady theme presented by the White House.

Now the president seems to be liberated to point out that the Republicans have been a tad tough to deal with these past few months. It’s hardly a full-throated denouncement of the hostage-takers. But he did observe that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has publicly defined his top task as defeating Obama in 2012, not boosting the US economy.

Still, reporters will keep on questioning Obama’s pivot toward politicking. CBS News’ Bill Plante asked the president if he was now merely campaigning—that is, following the example of President Harry Truman, who ran against a do-nothing Congress. Or, he added, “Are you negotiating?” (Perhaps a better way to have put this would have been, “Mr. President, why aren’t you bending over backward to negotiate with a political opposition that threatened economic default in order to get its way?”) In serious Washington, negotiating legislation trumps debating values.

Obama tried explaining again. He noted that he remains quite willing to listen to Republicans who have ideas about getting construction workers or teachers back to work. But, he said, the Republicans are only backing modest measures, such as trade deals and patent reform legislation. This is not enough, he asserted, “to meet the challenge of 9 percent unemployment.” He added, “If Congress does something, I can’t run against a do-nothing Congress.” (No doubt comments like that make Democratic senators cringe.)

Toward the end of the Q&A, Obama, who gave long answers to questions about Chinese currency manipulation, Solyndra, and the Fast and Furious gun trafficking investigation scandal, vowed to stick with the campaign for his jobs bill: “We’re going to keep on going at it.” Clearly, he views negotiations with the Republicans as a dead end. He was forced to conduct talks with them on the budget deal and the debt ceiling—in order to prevent negative outcomes (a government shutdown and a default crisis) that could threaten the economy. But it’s unlikely that talks about jobs legislation could yield much at this time. The dynamics that led to the craftily negotiated tax cut deal of last December, which essentially resulted in a second stimulus for Obama, are long gone, and Obama seems to have reconciled himself to the fact that the coming year will largely be consumed by a message war between him and the Republicans.

He doesn’t seem happy about that. In this press conference, he was hardly as pumped up as he has been while on the road these past few weeks. The real question is, can he sustain such a fight—the equivalent of a political ground war—for the next 13 months? It may be his only play, but it certainly will be hard for him to keep it fresh.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate