A president hemmed in by Congress

Bottoms Up, Lame Duck

By MAUREEN DOWD, NYT

WASHINGTON

During the 2012 campaign, the president and his top advisers liked to make the argument that if he was re-elected, the “fever” would break. Washington would no longer be the graveyard of progress, the crypt of consensus. Once dystopian Republicans accepted that Obama was not running again, they would start cooperating with him.

But it’s beginning to sink in that the opposite may be true.

The president called a press conference to mark the first 100 days of his second term, and he quickly ended up playing defense, dwelling on how hemmed in he feels.

ABC News’s Jonathan Karl asked Obama if he was already out of “juice” to pass his agenda, citing the president’s inability to get a watered-down gun bill passed in the Senate, Congress swatting away Obama on the sequester cuts, and the recent passage of a cybersecurity bill in the House with 92 Democrats on board, despite a veto threat from the White House.

“Well, if you put it that way, Jonathan, maybe I should just pack up and go home,” President Obama said with a flash of irritation, before tossing off a Mark Twain line: “Rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated at this point.”

(More here.)