Just 20 days after his inauguration, with Republicans trying to block his stimulus bill, President Obama refused to acknowledge that he had underestimated how hard it would be to change the way Washington works.
But as the president returned home on Sunday to face an even more rigidly divided capital, Mr. Obama went even further by blaming himself for failing to do what he had repeatedly promised — change the tone in Washington.
He said his own “obsessive” focus on implementing the right policies had led him to ignore a part of the reason voters handed him a mandate in 2008.
“I neglected some things that matter a lot to people, and rightly so: maintaining a bipartisan tone in Washington,” he told reporters in a brief question-and-answer session aboard Air Force One as he returned from a 10-day trip to Asia. “I’m going to redouble my efforts to go back to some of those first principles,” he promised.
Mr. Obama will have new opportunities to get it right almost immediately as he confronts a House soon to be controlled by Republicans and a Senate filled with Republicans who are emboldened by gains they made in midterm elections this month.
On Thursday, he will meet with the new Republican leadership as both sides play a coy game of brinksmanship over the future of the Bush-era tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of the year. In appearances on several talk shows yesterday, David Axelrod, the president’s top political adviser, refused to offer a specific path to compromise on the tax issue.
“I’m not going to negotiate that with you here,” Mr. Axelrod told David Gregory, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press.” But he added: “I think the country is saying that both Republicans and Democrats — forget about the politics for a while, sit down and work together to solve these problems and get this economy moving at a faster pace, and that’s what we intend to do.”
In his comments to reporters, Mr. Obama also cited his failure to get rid of budget earmarks as one reason why Washington had not changed. On that, too, he will soon have another chance.
Some Republicans, including the incoming House speaker, John A. Boehner, are pushing for a ban on earmarks, calling them a corrupting and wasteful practice. In his radio address on Saturday, Mr. Obama seconded that motion, saying that getting rid of earmarks would signal seriousness.
“We can’t afford ‘Bridges to Nowhere’ like the one that was planned a few years back in Alaska,” Mr. Obama said.
Creating a new tone in Washington was a central theme that ran throughout Mr. Obama’s campaign for the presidency.
In his announcement speech in Illinois in 2007, Mr. Obama lamented that “too many times, after the election is over, and the confetti is swept away, all those promises fade from memory, and the lobbyists and the special interests move in, and people turn away, disappointed as before, left to struggle on their own.”
During his speech to the Democratic National Convention 18 months later, Mr. Obama said that “what has also been lost is our sense of common purpose — our sense of higher purpose. And that’s what we have to restore.”
And just six days before the 2008 election, as he campaigned in North Carolina, Mr. Obama told a large crowd that “the change we need isn’t just about new programs and policies. It’s about a new politics — a politics that calls on our better angels instead of encouraging our worst instincts.”
For much of the last two years, Mr. Obama and his aides have pointed the finger of blame at Republicans, saying that efforts at changing the way Washington works have been systematically blocked by Republicans.
But Mr. Obama appears to have now concluded that some of the fault is shared by his own staff, which often pursued politics by traditional means as he tried to push through fiscal stability measures, health care reform and new financial regulations.
Among the things he neglected, he told reporters on Sunday: “Making sure that the policy decisions that I made were fully debated with the American people and that I was getting out of Washington and spending more time shaping public opinion and being in a conversation with the American people about why I was making the choices I was making.”
One of the first tests of that new policy will come as the president and the Republicans grapple with the recommendations of Mr. Obama’s commission on reducing the national debt. While on his trip to Asia, Mr. Obama pleaded with people in both parties to hold back their criticism.
Mr. Obama told reporters that he “very confident” that voters this month were not casting ballots for gridlock.
“They are not going to want to just obstruct, that they’re going to want to engage constructively,” he said of his Republican adversaries. “And then we’re going to have a whole bunch of time next year for some serious philosophical debates.”
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