Obama will seek more GOP backing on budget

He invited them over to watch the Super Bowl, visited them in their caucus rooms on Capitol Hill, and even flew a couple of them on Air Force One.

But for all the wooing, President Obama got zero Republican votes in the House and just three in the Senate for passage of his economic-stimulus legislation.

Now, as he prepares to make his nationally televised first address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, to lay out a 2010 budget proposal expected to include a down payment on changes in the health-care system, aides say Obama will rely more on his persuasion skills to build public pressure on lawmakers than

on the inside game in coming battles.

Obama still will solicit Republican support, they say, but the administration will not allow bipartisanship to become the defining political test it was in the stimulus struggle.

"His hand is open, but if you shake it, it has a very firm grip," White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told reporters after the bill passed. He said Washington's "insatiable appetite for the notion of bipartisanship" had obscured a significant victory on the stimulus.

If so, Obama was partly to blame. His promise of a post-partisan "new politics" was a central theme of his campaign, and he repeatedly stressed the importance of winning significant Republican support for the stimulus.

But the party-line votes on the bill made clear how deeply rooted partisanship is in Washington, a product of 30 years of White House strategies, polarization among voters, and growing ideological homogenization in both parties' congressional ranks.

In the early 1990s, for instance, about one-third of House Democrats were right-leaning Southerners. Now about one-quarter are, and the party has picked up House seats on both coasts, driving out moderate Republicans. A similar process has taken place in the Senate, researchers say.

"There are fewer and fewer reasons to be a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican in Congress. There is more geographic and ideological polarization," said Richard M. Skinner, a government professor at Bowdoin College who has written about partisanship.

Huge majorities of voters tell pollsters they want political leaders to work across the aisle, but "there's a gap between what people say and the way they behave," Skinner said. "Party identification is the single biggest predictor of how people vote."

Opposing the stimulus package appeared to invigorate the GOP after huge electoral losses, allowing party leaders to try to reclaim the mantle of fiscal conservatism damaged under the free-spending presidency of George W. Bush. Of course, analysts point out, there also is political risk in going against a popular president in a time of national crisis.

"Everybody wants him to succeed, and we all realize we're in a challenging time . . . but ultimately it comes down to what's on the floor, what's in writing in the bill," said Rep. Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.), who represents a swing district that includes parts of Chester, Montgomery and Berks Counties. "Otherwise, it's all talk."

Gerlach said the stimulus bill was filled with "an orgy of spending" on pet projects extraneous to the goal of creating jobs, with too little spending on infrastructure projects and too few tax cuts for small business. He said about 70 percent of the constituents who had contacted his office opposed the bill.

Gerlach was among 28 Republican moderates pounded - ultimately in vain - in radio ads by White House allies in the final days of the stimulus debate, and Obama himself ratcheted up the pressure as polling indicated that GOP criticism of the legislation was beginning to stick.

After spending the first three weeks of his administration in Washington, Obama criticized Republicans and hit the road with campaign-style events promoting the stimulus bill in Indiana, Florida, Virginia, and Illinois. Last week, he signed it into law in Colorado.

Gerlach said that Democratic leaders had written the bill with no meaningful Republican input, but that he had gotten the sense "in talking with President Obama's legislative people that they don't want to see it happen that way again on major pieces of legislation."

"They've reached out to us on a couple of occasions" since, he said. "They seem very interested in our ideas. I suggested, 'If that's the case, involve us much earlier in the process, in crafting the legislation, and then you'll get a lot more votes on a bipartisan basis.' "

Obama's two immediate predecessors also found it tough to reach across the aisle. Bush won early Democratic support on education legislation but ran into increasing resistance. And 16 years ago, Bill Clinton's economic plan passed without a single Republican vote in Congress.

In that instance, GOP discipline paid off. The party capitalized on Clinton's mistakes to gain control of both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm election.

"This is all contingent on what happens," Skinner said. "If there's not much of an economic recovery in the next two years, who knows?" But if voters perceive progress by the 2010 election, "there could be a negative loop, where Republicans satisfy the conservative base but dig themselves further into a hole."

Polls indicate that sizable majorities of voters approve of Obama's performance and the stimulus, though there is some skepticism about how effective it might be. In a CNN poll of 1,046 adults, released Friday, 44 percent said they thought the measure would bring "no significant improvement" to the economy.

Obama will get another chance Tuesday night to make his case.

governors laud stimulus. A6.

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