Republicans Smell Weakness In Obama

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Charles Dharapak / AP Photo The public may have liked the president’s big speech, but the GOP isn’t worried. Insiders say they’re raring for a fight, and that they think Obama’s in a very vulnerable position.

Here’s how it looked from the Republican side of the aisle. “[House Minority Leader John] Boehner told us,” a senior Republican recounted to me after the president’s address on the financial crisis to a joint session of Congress, “‘Behave, be cool, be nice, sit back, all smiles, no carping, no attacking the president, no trouble. For six months.’ And everyone is cool with that. The morale is great. The old guys are into it as much as the young. We just sat there through the speech and smiled and nodded. There was only one time there might have been towel snapping, when he mentioned there were no earmarks in the stimulus bill. The boys got a little rowdy at that point. A little out of line. Could you hear it on the TV? They were a little rude. The president kept looking to the Democrats for the love, and then he would look at us to act smug, and we gotta out of line at that earmark mention.”

A senior House Republican told me: “Bipartisan this and that, bipartisan anything. Go to the meetings, listen closely, shake hands. The president is a star. His financial team isn’t. And he knows it.”

The GOP House members are a randy, sophisticated, energetic lot, and they are eager for the contest with the young Obama administration and the Democratic House leadership. So far the House GOP has confidence that not only will they not be overrun by the Democratic hordes and their media cavalry but also that they are attracting the ears of the Republican voters who sense a phenomenon building from the ash-heap left by DeLay, Abramoff and the Rovian administration. The same young Republican members who voted twice “No” against the grotesque TARP plan and the false-tongued Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in the 110th Congress are now joined by the old fogey leaders in the caucus already voting “No” twice to the gargantuan trillion-dollar Democratic stimulus plan with not a single Republican vote for it.

That was the “towel snapping” moment during the president’s speech. Whether they are right or not, the GOP House members sense animal weakness in the Obama administration on just this point: that the stimulus plan won’t work, that the polls show the American voters doubt it will work, and that the Obama administration is clumsily defensive and prickly because they cannot demonstrate it will work. Hence the strange line, “No one messes with Joe,” in Obama’s speech, as if Joe Biden will be the enforcer of the stimulus trillions. “Joe Biden is just another back-slapping senator who no one dislikes,” said senior House Republican told me, laughing and dismissing the question. “The most you can say is that he might be nutty.”

“I feel sorry for him sometimes,” confided a senior Republican House member about President Obama. “He invited us over to the White House to explain to us how the stimulus plan is working, and how the budget is going to work, and he spoke to us a couple of times. He doesn’t act like he knows what’s going on with the economy. He’s so afraid of confrontation, when you challenge him, he backs off, like he doesn’t know the right answer. Who does? That’s why you kinda feel sorry for him. Not his guys, they don’t act like they know. Do they notice the stock market sinking? Who doesn’t? There’s this sense of disarray. The administration is made up of a lot of Number twos. The only one with any gravitas is [David] Axelrod. Geithner? He looks like he’s 12-years-old, or a grad student. The president is like a perfect vice president. That’s what the big speech was like. A vice president was talking.”

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