Obama goes on the offensive

By Peter Nicholas and Janet Hook

March 17, 2009

Reporting from Washington — Faced with growing skepticism over aspects of his economic agenda, President Obama has launched an aggressive campaign-style offensive to bolster congressional supporters and marginalize Republican opponents.

Millions of campaign supporters are receiving e-mails urging them to call members of Congress. Groups allied with the White House are running ads scorning the president's foes. States that were closely contested in the 2008 election are again getting visits from Obama.

On Thursday, Obama will even turn up in Jay Leno's studio to appear on "The Tonight Show." Candidates have often used late-night talk shows to highlight their lighter side, but no sitting president has ever appeared on one, NBC said.

The return to campaign-style tactics is intended to pressure lawmakers to back Obama's plans in Congress, particularly his $3.6-trillion budget. That would be a tough sell in any environment, with lawmakers and industry lobbyists skeptical of sweeping and costly plans to revamp healthcare, convert to alternative fuel and stabilize the financial sector.

Complicating the president's job were revelations over the weekend that insurance giant American International Group Inc. was paying $165 million in executive bonuses even though it had accepted a huge federal bailout.

News of the bonuses has threatened to stir a populist backlash against the rescue of AIG and other financial services, which in turn could raise voter concerns that the administration is squandering taxpayer money.

"There is a certain amount of bailout fatigue that's settled on [Capitol] Hill, and something like this isn't going to help," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

"This is another outrageous example of executives -- including those whose decisions were responsible for the problems that caused AIG's collapse -- enriching themselves at the expense of taxpayers," said Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.

"It's going to increase the level of populist anger" about government spending, said Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee. Ryan said he started hearing from angry constituents about AIG last weekend at a Kiwanis Club pancake breakfast.

Obama sought to quell the resentment Monday with a speech promising to use every legal resource available to block the AIG bonuses. With "The Tonight Show," he will have another prominent platform, and a friendly audience, to talk about the issue, if he chooses.

The appearance may also help lift Obama's approval rating.

Two polls taken this month, one by the Pew Research Center, the other by Opinion Research Corp., found slippage in Obama's poll numbers as the economy has soured. The Pew poll found Obama's rating had dropped to 59% from 64% last month; Opinion Research recorded a 3% drop.

In promoting its agenda, the White House is using some rougher tactics.

Even as Obama positions himself as a post-partisan leader who wants to cooperate with Republicans, his White House is operating in a more combative fashion, and it has been consulting with allied groups aiming to marginalize the Republican Party leadership.

Asked Monday about a weekend TV appearance by former Vice President Dick Cheney, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, "Well, I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy, so they trotted out the next most popular member of the Republican cabal."

Part of the campaign is a coordinated assault on Republican Party leaders, depicting them as a recalcitrant minority determined to block the president's agenda at any cost.

A TV ad aired by a tax-exempt group called Americans United for Change accuses Republicans of merely saying "no" to the Obama agenda, rather than proposing policy alternatives of their own.

"So, what kind of budget have the Republicans proposed to get us out of the mess they created?" a narrator asks. "Here are the details . . ."

Crickets are heard in the background, suggesting that the GOP has nothing to say.

The White House has maintained close ties with several grass-roots organizations.

A spokesman for Americans United for Change said the group had consulted on strategy with Jim Messina, a White House deputy chief of staff and former Obama campaign official.

In addition, consultations on passing the president's budget have been taking place between MoveOn.org and the White House public liaison office, headed by Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of the president. This month, MoveOn.org sent an e-mail touting Obama's budget to 5 million members. It describes the blueprint as "ambitious, amazing and unapologetically progressive."

Ilyse Hogue, communications director for the group, said the White House liaison office was "very encouraging of us staying involved and keeping our members involved. . . . We certainly pass on what we're doing to everybody that we know over there."

A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: "We have a general outreach strategy to talk about the president's priorities to groups of all shapes and sizes. And that includes groups that are progressive in nature, conservative in nature and some that are none of the above."

The Democratic National Committee is posting Internet ads with an anti-Republican theme echoing that of Americans United for Change. Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for the DNC, was until recently president of Americans United for Change.

Behind Obama is a political network that Democratic predecessors lacked. Americans United for Change, for example, was founded just four years ago. Federal tax records show that in 2007, the group raised more than $4 million.

Paul Begala, an advisor to former President Clinton, said Obama was "the beneficiary and the inheritor of a large, progressive infrastructure that was put in place while Democrats were in exile. When Clinton was president, he had very little of this."

On a separate track, Obama is marshaling the campaign volunteers who helped put him in office.

In recent days, e-mails went out to 13 million Obama supporters from David Plouffe, who was Obama's campaign manager, and Mitch Stewart, director of Organizing for America -- the Obama campaign apparatus that is now housed at the DNC.

Campaign supporters are being asked to call lawmakers to lobby for Obama's budget and broader agenda.

Obama aides also want them to organize neighborhood canvassing operations this weekend.

Party officials are giving volunteers, called "hosts," access to the same voter lists used during the campaign to target potential supporters. Those voters will be asked to participate in an organized effort to knock on doors and persuade people to support the Obama agenda.

The neighborhood-based strategy paid off in the 2008 presidential race. The question now is whether the largely liberal volunteers can be motivated to support a budget bill that inevitably involves compromise.

"Partisan voices and special interests are showing real resistance to President Obama's call for making the necessary reforms and investments in energy, healthcare and education," Stewart said in a Monday e-mail to supporters. "That's why we need to bring the conversation back into homes and communities across America."

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Peter Wallsten in our Washington bureau contributed to this report.

Hell hath no fury like a Republican scorned, especially a blonde one with weight issues.

Meghan McCain, the 24-year-old daughter of Senator John McCain, showed more than a flash of her father's notorious ill temper when a conservative radio host, Laura Ingraham, mocked her as a "plus-sized model" and a "Valley Girl gone awry".

She took her revenge on the women-only chat show The View, borrowing a line from the retired model Tyra Banks when her weight was questioned: "Kiss my fat ass."

The spat began when Ms McCain, who started her own political blog during her father's ill-fated presidential campaign and now blogs for The Daily Beast, wrote a piece last week criticising the conservative columnist Ann Coulter for perpetuating "negative stereotypes" against Republicans.

Her argument was that Coulter, the "poster girl" of the Republican Right, deliberately took controversial hardline standpoints to help sell her books – but risked alienating younger votes by doing so.

For Laura Ingrahams, another conservative whose syndicated talk show draws more than five million listeners, it was a presumptuous and ill-considered attack.

On her radio show, she asked: "Do you think that anyone would be talking to you if you weren’t kind of cute and you weren’t the daughter of John McCain?"

Mimicking McCain's 'like, totally" Valley Girl intonation, she added: "Ok, I was really hoping that I was going to get that role in the Real World, but then I realised that, well, they don’t like plus-sized models. They only like the women who look a certain way. And on this 50th anniversary of Barbie, I really have something to say."

McCain was furious, even though she claimed never to have heard of the radio host before. "I have nothing to hide: I am a size 8 and fluctuated up to a size 10 during the campaign. It’s ridiculous even to have this conversation because I am not overweight in the least and have a natural body weight," she wrote.

"But even if I were overweight, it would be ridiculous. I expected substantive criticism from conservative pundits for my views... That is the nature of political discourse, and my intent was to generate discussion about the current problems facing the Republican Party.

"Unfortunately, even though Ingraham is more than 20 years older than I and has been a political pundit for longer, almost, than I have been alive, she responded in a form that was embarrassing to herself and to any woman listening to her radio program who was not a size 0."

She added: "At this point, I have more respect for Ann Coulter than I do for Laura Ingraham because at least Coulter didn’t come back at me with heartless, substance-less attacks about my weight."