Obama strategy: Marginalize most powerful critics

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28532.html

This is the first of a two-part look at the marginalization of the
GOP. Tomorrow: GOP officials fear that the party's image is being
defined increasingly by boisterous conservative commentators.

President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most
powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White
House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and
lobbying worlds.

With a series of private meetings and public taunts, the White House
has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending
pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the
country's most-listened-to conservative commentator; and now, with a
new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance
industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News.

Obama aides are using their powerful White House platform, combined
with techniques honed in the 2008 campaign, to cast some of the most
powerful adversaries as out of the mainstream and their criticism as
unworthy of serious discussion.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs has mocked Limbaugh from the White House
press room podium. White House aides limited access to the Chamber and
made top adviser Valerie Jarrett available to reporters to disparage
the group. Everyone from White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn has piled on Fox News
by contending it's not a legitimate news operation.

All of the techniques are harnessed to a larger purpose: to
marginalize not only the individual person or organization but also
some of the most important policy and publicity allies of the national
Republican Party.

Dunn said that in August, as the president's aides planned for the
fall, they made "a fundamental decision that we needed to be more
aggressive in both protecting our position and in delineating our
differences with those who were attacking us."

"It was a time for us to look at the extraordinary success we've had
in terms of legislation but also to look at where we needed to be more
aggressive in defining what the choices are, and in protecting and
pushing forward our agenda," she said.

The campaign underscores how deeply political the Obama White House is
in its daily operations — with a strong focus on redrawing the
electoral map and discrediting the personalities and ideas that have
powered the conservative movement over the past 20 years.

This determination has manifested itself in small ways: This president
has done three times as many fundraisers as President George W. Bush
had at this point in his term. And in large ones: Beginning with their
contretemps with Limbaugh last winter, Obama's most important advisers
miss few opportunities for public and highly partisan shots at his
most influential critics.

It's too early to tell if the campaign is working, but it's clearly
exacerbating partisan tensions in Washington.

"They won — why don't they act like it?" said Dana Perino, former
White House press secretary to Bush. "The more they fight, the more
defensive they look. It's only been 10 months, and they're burning
bridges in a lot of different places."

White House officials see things differently. They see an opportunity
to corner critics of the president's policies, especially on health
care and financial regulations, and, in the process, further
marginalize the Republican Party.

Privately, officials have talked with relish for months of the
potential to isolate the GOP as a narrow party of white, Southern
conservatives with little appeal to independent-minded voters.

This won't happen overnight, but a combination of demographics —
especially the explosion of a Hispanic population that has been voting
for Democrats — the near-extinction of Republicans in the Northeast
and the steady rightward drift of the GOP's grass-roots activists at
least makes it a plausible goal.

By design or not, nearly every Republican whom Obama has nominated for
a White House job — Ray LaHood for Transportation, Judd Gregg for
Commerce and John McHugh for the Army — represents an area Democrats
can take back if the sitting Republican is gone. None is from the
South.

So is the strategy working? White House officials point to a new ABC
News/Washington Post poll to argue the answer is emphatically yes.
Only 20 percent of those surveyed identified themselves as
Republicans, the lowest in 26 years of asking the question.