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Obama outreach to GOP a balancing act

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Photo by AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson

President Barack Obama approaches the media to make a statement on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2009, after meeting with lawmakers at the Capitol.

WASHINGTON — In his first days on the job, President Barack Obama has acted to appease core Democratic interest groups, making good on a few campaign promises and shoring up support among key constituencies as he reaches out to Republicans on the big economic stimulus package. It's a balancing act.

While Obama's first week is generally being hailed by fellow Democrats, he's drawn some push-back from groups that don't think he's gone far enough.

And that can put him in the line of unwanted crossfire from both Republicans and disillusioned Democrats.

"He's trying to tilt left to stay in the center so he doesn't get done in by friendly fire," said Democratic pollster Doug Schoen. "Right now, I think he may be more worried about Nancy Pelosi than John Boehner." Pelosi, D-Calif., is the House speaker and Boehner, R-Ohio, the House minority leader.

"On the other hand, he's got good will. And I don't think he's made any missteps. But unless he achieves results quickly, he will be more vulnerable than anyone can imagine," said Schoen, who worked in the Clinton White House.

In his first week, Obama moved to reverse many of former President George W. Bush's most contentious policies. He pledged to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, set tighter limits on CIA interrogation tactics, outlined plans to withdraw combat forces from Iraq and reversed Bush's financing restrictions on overseas abortion-help groups.

He moved to reduce fuel consumption and combat global warming, imposed strict ethics guidelines on top White House staff and appointees and halted last-minute rules and regulations put in place by his predecessor. He named special envoys for the Middle East and for Afghanistan-Pakistan. Then he went to Capitol Hill to try to sell his $825 billion stimulus plan. You'd think that would go over well with Democratic liberals. And it did for the most part.

But some anti-war activists are unhappy he isn't shuttering Guantanamo sooner or moving to pull troops out of Iraq as quickly as he seemed to suggest during his campaign. Others are chagrined that Obama kept Defense Secretary Robert Gates and that he is intensifying the war on terror — although Obama expressly doesn't call it that — in Afghanistan.

The anti-war group Code Pink complained when Obama did not protest Israel's bombing in Gaza. Some liberals and gay rights groups are still peeved he invited evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver an invocation at his inauguration.

His strict new limits on hiring lobbyists were welcomed by groups supporting more transparency and ethics in government. But the White House then had to issue a waiver for former Raytheon lobbyist William J. Lynn to become deputy defense secretary. And questions linger over Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's explanations of why he initially failed to pay $34,023 in Social Security and Medicare taxes when he worked for the International Monetary Fund.

On the Republican side, many are uncomfortable with the $825 billion price tag of the White House-backed stimulus bill, suggesting it includes wasteful spending and too few tax cuts.

"There are some legitimate philosophical differences with parts of my plan that the Republicans have and I respect that," Obama said in the Capitol on Tuesday. He said he didn't "expect 100 percent agreement" but hoped both sides could put politics aside.

Republicans generally welcomed Obama's overtures, even if they disagreed with details.

But many Democrats are uncomfortable with the $275 billion in new tax cuts put in the White House-backed bill in part to curry GOP support. Many Democrats are also unhappy about Obama's appeal to House Democrats to jettison an estimated $200 million ticketed for family planning services for low-income people — a provision Pelosi had defended in a weekend television interview.

Economist Rob Shapiro, a top Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration who was on Obama's transition advisory team, questioned the effectiveness of the $275 billion in tax cuts in the measure now before the House. "These tax cuts are not only not stimulative, but we're going to have to pay for them eventually."

Still, Shapiro, now an official with NDN, a think tank formerly known as the New Democratic Network, said it's more important not to let the debate over the stimulus package "degenerate into politics as usual. If the country believes this has turned into a package of special-interest spending and tax provisions, then the efforts to restore confidence will be damaged."

As a candidate, Obama once likened himself to "a blank screen on which people of vastly different stripes project their own views."

That doesn't work very well for a president.

Pollster Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, notes that polls since the election show that the public generally sees Obama as less ideological than they saw Bush.

"One of the things he has going for him is that the public wants to see him take a bipartisan approach," Kohut said. "And many independents, in particular, will accept a little bit of bobbing and weaving on different issues."