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 Obama and his advisers have signaled for weeks that the president
would take a more active role in using his pen and phone to sign
orders that do not require lawmaker approval and cajole others to
back his priorities.
Senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Obama needed Congress
to pass immigration reform and extend unemployment insurance but
that the president would telegraph in his State of the Union address
on Tuesday that he would not be patient with lawmakers in areas
where he did not need them.
"The president ... is not going to tell the American people that
he's going to wait for Congress," Pfeiffer told CNN's "State of the
Union with Candy Crowley" program.
"He's going to move forward in areas like job training, education,
manufacturing, on his own to try to restore opportunity for American
families," Pfeiffer said.
Republicans, speaking ahead of the high profile Tuesday evening
address, were not pleased.
"It sounds vaguely like a threat and I think it also has a certain
amount of arrogance in the sense that one of the fundamental
principles of our country were the checks and balances," Republican
Senator Rand Paul, a potential presidential candidate in 2016, said
on the same program.
"Welcome to the real world. It's hard to convince people to get
legislation through. It takes consensus. But that's what he needs to
be doing is building consensus and not taking his pen and creating
law," he said.
Mitch McConnell, the U.S. Senate's top Republican, said his party
wanted to work with the president on free trade agreements and would
be willing to extend unemployment benefits as long as doing so did
not add to the national debt.
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"The president has sort of hung out on a limb and tried to get what
he wants through the bureaucracy as opposed to moving to the
political center," McConnell told "Fox News Sunday."
"We're anxious to help him create jobs, but we're not going to go
over and endorse more spending, more debt, more taxes and more
regulation."
The White House's new strategy comes after a tough 2013 in which his
legislative goals on priorities such as gun control and immigration
reform died or languished in Congress. Republicans have a majority
in the House of Representatives and Democrats control the Senate.
With an eye to Obama's legacy, administration officials are eager to
avoid the same fate in 2014 and have stressed that they will not
judge the year's success based on legislative achievements.
The Washington Post quoted one official saying Obama previously had
governed too much like a prime minister who needed support from
lawmakers and not enough like a president who could act on his own
accord.
Obama plans to unveil a new plan to help people still looking for
jobs in the recovering economy during his Tuesday address and will
follow that up with a four-state tour on Wednesday and Thursday.
(Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu and Andy Sullivan;
editing by
Jim Loney)
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