Obama gets tough on GOP
WASHINGTON — With a tone of outrage and eye-rolling dismissiveness, President Barack Obama and his White House team are working out their aggressions on Republicans. Well into the final quarter of Obama’s presidency the White House approach is, if you can’t join ’em, beat ’em.
Even with a whiff of bipartisanship in the air, the president is going on offense and building on a strategy employed since Democrats lost control of the Senate. The White House approach is to single a Republican lawmaker out, pick a fight and not mince words.
In just the past week, the president and his spokesman have targeted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican Sens. John McCain and Charles Grassley, on topics from climate change to the Iran nuclear deal to the delayed confirmation of attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch.
This is a White House unleashed, forgoing niceties for the kind of blunt talk some of Obama’s allies have been demanding for some time. But the rhetoric carries risks of sounding peevish and signals that a president who once ran on the promise of changing Washington has embraced its political combat.
On Friday, Obama delivered a testy lecture to Republicans, decrying the long wait Lynch has faced since she was nominated in early November.
“Enough!” he said, addressing Senate Republicans. “This is embarrassing, a process like this.”
Last Saturday, Obama hit McCain especially hard, after his 2008 presidential rival declared a major setback in the Iran nuclear talks after Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, demanded that sanctions against Tehran had to be lifted immediately after a deal went into place. (The preliminary deal says the sanctions will be lifted as Iran proves it is complying with limits on its nuclear program.)
Obama cast McCain’s criticism as an assault on the credibility of Secretary of State John Kerry.
“That’s an indication of the degree to which partisanship has crossed all boundaries,” Obama said. “That’s a problem. It needs to stop.”
He went on: “We have Mitch McConnell trying to tell the world, oh, don’t have confidence in the U.S. government’s abilities to fulfill any climate change pledge that we might make.”
On Thursday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest singled out Grassley, declaring comments he made about the Lynch vote “duplicitous.”
Pat Griffin, who was legislative director in the Clinton administration, said the tone from the White House dovetails with the aggressive strategy Obama has set since his party lost control of the Senate in November and put Congress in Republican hands.
“I think the president since the election has kept these guys on their heels,” Griffin said. Obama and his aides “have come to understand that you don’t get the attention of these guys and the attention of the country without having some edge.”
