Gregg exit shadows Obama’s victory

President Obama appears to be close to winning his first major legislative battle, pushing through a $789 billion economic stimulus package in his first month in office.

Supporters of the bill, historians and past administration officials are praising the strategy the new White House employed in getting a bill to the president’s desk in what feels like record time for a city that traditionally is slow to act, mired in partisan gridlock.

{mosads}And while Obama’s efforts at securing bipartisan support for the plan appear to have fallen well short of his goal, he scored an early win after he and senior officials recognized that expeditiousness would have to take priority over bipartisanship, and a more aggressive, higher-profile communications strategy was in order.

Only three Senate Republicans voted for the stimulus in their chamber, and the House version passed without the backing of a single Republican.

The victory on the stimulus was further blunted Thursday by news that Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) had withdrawn his nomination as Obama’s Commerce secretary. Gregg cited differences on the stimulus as a major reason for his decision.

On Capitol Hill, supporters of the stimulus bill said Obama deserved credit for reaching out to Republicans and the public on the need for some sort of government action to jumpstart the economy.

“The president did a good job of making the case for the dire circumstances our country finds itself in,” said Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), one of three GOP senators to back the bill. “He certainly has done a lot of outreach.”

Collins also praised the work of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who earned a reputation for being a hard-nosed partisan while he served in the House. Collins said that Emanuel, who joined the bill’s negotiations in the Senate, was “very critical” to the deal.

Candida Wolff, one of President George W. Bush’s assistants for legislative affairs, said she was surprised “early on by the carte blanche that was handed over [to congressional Democrats].” But she said every president has a learning curve, and the Bush White House, like the Obama team, got more aggressive during the conference committee phase because it is easier to control the outcome at that point.

Wolff and others noted that the Obama administration “ceded a lot of ground early in the communications war,” a notion that the White House seemed to recognize and remedy with high-profile and more aggressive speeches at the Democratic retreat and in places around the country that were hit hard by the economic crisis.

Author Doris Kearns Goodwin, on Capitol Hill to commemorate Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday, said that Obama’s early presidency already has parallels to that of the 16th president. Obama, like Lincoln, understands talking to the public and reaching out to members of the other party, Goodwin said.

“Lincoln never demonized the opposition. And that seems to be Obama’s strength, to really reach out,” she said. “It doesn’t mean you don’t make the decision eventually, but at least they know that he’s listening to them, and that’s what Lincoln did. The country respects what he’s doing.”

Democrats said that Obama was smart to make the case for the stimulus to the public through town-hall meetings in Elkhart, Ind., and Fort Myers, Fla.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said that the president should have been looking outside of Washington for support earlier in the process.

{mospagebreak}“I think that would’ve forced the hand of bipartisanship,” Grijalva said. “Three Republican senators were critical to this, but if you look at it objectively, that’s not bipartisanship.”

While many are crediting the new president for getting a bill at all, Republican opponents of the stimulus, who continued to decry the size of the package and what it contains, argued that Obama didn’t get the bipartisan result he was hoping for, saying that his outreach was largely lip service not taken into practice on Capitol Hill.

{mosads}Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said Obama made nice gestures by meeting with Republicans on the bill but failed to follow up by including Republican ideas in the bill.

“If the definition of bipartisanship is meeting with the Democrats who are nice to us, that doesn’t really meet the criteria,” Thune said.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said that the president and Democrats only had success in using the tactic of fear to win support.

“From the standpoint of using the sort of crisis mentality that people feel across this country, they were able to capitalize on that and put in place a lot of spending programs that have not a lot to do whatsoever with stimulating the economy,” Corker said.

Patrick Griffin, one of President Clinton’s assistants for legislative affairs early in his administration, said he was surprised how quickly the Republican opposition dug in and how “vociferous” they were in opposition. Once they signaled they were unwilling to give much on Obama’s plan, Griffin said, the White House smartly traded bipartisanship for urgency.

Griffin said the Obama administration has already recognized a strategically beneficial willingness to cede control of the language in order to take advantage of the “the windows of political opportunity.”

“It is very different than what we did in the Clinton administration,” Griffin said. “I think we spent too much time dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, and in some cases it was fatal.”

Both Griffin and Wolff, veterans of legislative battles between the White House and Capitol Hill, said that given the uniqueness of the economic situation, it would be unwise to read the last few weeks’ victories, stumbles and maneuvers as a predictor of what Obama’s overall legislative strategy might be.

Wolff noted that Bush had months of time to spend on outreach and legislative ideas before putting his tax-cut plan on Capitol Hill. Obama, she said, “didn’t have that luxury.”

“I could see some of the learning curve,” Wolff said. “I suspect that it was a little more difficult than he thought it was going to be.”