Obama Must Walk Fine Line as Congress Takes Up Agenda

WASHINGTON — The days ahead could be decisive ones for the main pieces of President Obama’s second-term agenda: long-range deficit reduction, gun safety and changes to immigration law.

With Congress back this week from a recess, bipartisan groups of senators who have been negotiating about immigration and gun violence are due to unveil their agreements, though prospects for a gun deal are in question as the emotional impact of the massacre in Newtown, Conn., has faded and the National Rifle Association has marshaled opposition. And on Wednesday, Mr. Obama will send his annual budget to Capitol Hill intended as a compromise offer, though early signs suggest that Republican leaders have little interest in reviving talks.

Members of both parties say Mr. Obama faces a conundrum with his legislative approach to a deeply polarized Congress. In the past, when he has stayed aloof from legislative action, Republicans and others have accused him of a lack of leadership; when he has gotten involved, they have complained that they could not support any bill so closely identified with Mr. Obama without risking the contempt of conservative voters.

Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, called this predicament Mr. Obama’s “Catch-22.” And Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said he had often seen it at work since 2010 while negotiating with Republican lawmakers to reach a long-term budget agreement.

At times, Mr. Warner said, Republicans would urge him to get Mr. Obama more involved, saying, “Gosh, Warner, we’ve got to have the president.” Other times, he said, the same lawmakers would plead otherwise, saying, “If the president comes out for this, you know it is going to kill us in the House.”

“Everybody wants him involved to the right degree at the right moment,” Mr. Warner said, “but not anytime before or after.”

The challenge for Mr. Obama became evident as soon as he took office, when Republicans almost unanimously opposed his economic stimulus package even as the recession was erasing nearly 800,000 jobs a month. The author Robert Draper opened his recent book about the House, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do,” with an account from Republican leaders who dined together on the night of Mr. Obama’s 2009 inauguration and agreed that the way to regain power was to oppose whatever he proposed.

Though Mr. Obama was able to prevail over Republican opposition in his first two years as president because Democrats had majorities in the House and the Senate, that changed when Republicans won control of the House in 2010, giving them a brake to apply to the president’s agenda.

Other than the stimulus experience in early 2009, the moment that most captured that polarization for the White House occurred a year later. In early 2010 Republican senators, including the minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, demanded that Mr. Obama endorse bipartisan legislation to create a deficit-reduction commission. But when he finally did so, they voted against the bill, killing it.

Now the president’s three pending priorities are shaping up as test cases for how he and Republicans will work together — or not — in his second term.

Each measure — on the budget, guns and immigration — in its own way illustrates the fine line that Mr. Obama must walk to succeed even with national opinion on his side. Privately, the White House is optimistic only about the prospects for an immigration bill, which would create a path to citizenship for about 11 million people in the country illegally.

That is because an immigration compromise is the only one that Republicans see as being in their own interests, given their party’s unpopularity with the fast-growing Latino electorate. In contrast, most Republicans see little advantage in backing gun legislation, given hostility toward it in their states or in districts throughout the South and the West and in rural areas. A budget compromise would require agreeing to higher taxes, which are anathema to conservative voters, in exchange for Mr. Obama’s support for the reductions in Medicare and Social Security that they want.

Yet even on immigration, many Republicans are weighing their party’s long-term interests in supporting a compromise against their own short-term arguments for opposing one: antipathy remains deep in conservative districts to any proposal that would grant citizenship. That calculation also holds for Republicans planning to seek the 2016 presidential nomination.

Against this backdrop, Mr. Obama early on outlined elements that he wanted in the immigration and gun measures. Then he purposely left the drafting to Congress. Senior aides, mainly the chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, and the deputy chief of staff, Rob Nabors, check in daily with senators. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. stays in touch with his former Senate colleagues about the gun bill talks.

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After Paul Falters, Backers Push Agenda in Party and Other Races

More than $560,000 later, Mr. Ramsey’s chosen standard-bearer, Thomas H. Massie, a Republican, cruised to victory Tuesday in the race to select a successor to Representative Geoff Davis, a Republican who is retiring.

The saturation advertising campaign waged by Mr. Ramsey’s “super PAC,” Liberty for All, may be the most visible manifestation of a phenomenon catching the attention of Republicans from Maine to Nevada.

With their favorite having lost the nomination for president, Mr. Paul’s dedicated band of youthful supporters is looking down-ballot and swarming lightly guarded Republican redoubts like state party conventions in an attempt to infiltrate the top echelons of the party.

“Karl Rove’s fear-and-smear-style Republicans are going to wake up at the end of the year and realize we are now in control of the Republican Party,” said Preston Bates, a Democrat-turned-Paulite who is running Liberty for All for Mr. Ramsey.

In Minnesota, Paulites stormed the Republican gathering in St. Cloud last weekend, bumping aside two conventional Republican candidates to choose one of their own, Kurt P. Bills, a high school economics teacher, to challenge Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, this fall.

Backers of Mr. Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, crashed Republican conventions in Iowa, Maine, Minnesota and Nevada in recent weeks, snatching up the lion’s share of delegate slots for the Republican National Convention in Tampa this August, a potential headache for the national party and its presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney.

And Paulite candidates for Congress are sprouting up from Florida to Virginia to Colorado, challenging sitting Republicans and preaching the gospel of radically smaller government, an end to the Federal Reserve, restraints on Bush-era antiterrorism laws and a pullback from foreign military adventures.

“I’d call it a strict constitutional approach,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and Ron Paul’s son. “And I think it’s spreading.”

Republican Party officials say they are in daily contact with Representative Paul, in a delicate effort to harness the energy around him without inciting his supporters. “We have had open dialogue with Dr. Paul and his campaign to ensure we are all focused on winning in November,” said Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s communications director.

Mr. Ramsey said that other Paul supporters had brought the Kentucky race to his attention and that he would spend whatever it takes “to get this country moving in a freer direction.” “How much money would you spend for freedom?” he asked Tuesday, after buying airtime from Lexington to Louisville with money he inherited from his grandfather in 2010 as he was being pulled into the libertarian orbit of Mr. Paul.

He met Mr. Bates on the Paul campaign, and in March they incorporated Liberty for All with nearly $1 million of Mr. Ramsey’s money. More than half of it went into Kentucky’s Fourth District in a whoosh of advertising. The impact has been significant.

Mr. Massie, the Lewis County judge executive and an engineer trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he opened the seven-way Republican primary with a lead. But he lost it after Mr. Davis and former Senator Jim Bunning backed one of his rivals, Alecia Webb-Edgington. Then small advertising buys from two other candidates pummeled him with negative accusations.

The sprawling Fourth District of Kentucky presents competitors with a challenge. To reach all its voters, a candidate must advertise in four media markets in Kentucky and Ohio. Mr. Massie acknowledged that he could not do that, but that Liberty for All could. Soon, the advertising for his rivals was drowned out by attacks on his behalf.

“They owned the airwaves, everything from the Food Channel to Court TV,” he said of the PAC.

The Ramsey money does not have a clear path from Kentucky, but Liberty for All appears to have a taste for the obscure. Its next candidate is Michael D. Cargill, a gay, black gun store owner running for constable in Travis County, Tex.

But the political action committee will have money to spend. Mr. Ramsey said that between his wallet and a fund-raising push, the PAC expected to have $10 million this summer.

As they were nominating Mr. Bills at the Minnesota Republican Convention, the Paul forces also seized 12 of the state’s 13 Republican National Convention delegate slots. In Maine, they took 21 of the 24 slots. In Nevada, they grabbed 22 of the 28.

The strategy of crashing state conventions has secured Mr. Paul large slates of delegates in Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana and Missouri, as well.

Such delegates are not considered a threat to the Romney nomination. But they could be vocal advocates for Mr. Paul’s libertarian views on issues like the war in Afghanistan, the Patriot Act and terrorist detainee policies, which overlap some with Tea Party views but do not mirror them.

And lightly regarded Paulites running for Congress could become forces with the right amount of money. Tisha Casida, an independent in Colorado, is running against Representative Scott Tipton. Calen Fretts is chipping away at Representative Jeff Miller in Florida’s Panhandle, and Karen Kwiatkowski is challenging Representative Robert W. Goodlatte in Virginia.

“I think there’s a great movement going on in this country,” said Ms. Casida, who said she was pulled into politics by Mr. Paul’s message and the red tape she faced trying to open a local farmer’s market.

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