With his victory, Obama has the political capital to push through an immigration bill. Obama's latest, familiar strategy

President Barack Obama made his plans for his newly won political capital official — he’s going to hammer House Republicans on immigration.

And it’s evident from his public and private statements that Obama’s latest immigration push is, in at least one respect, similar to his fiscal showdown strategy: yet again, the goal is to boost public pressure on House Republican leadership to call a vote on a Senate-passed measure.


“The majority of Americans think this is the right thing to do,” Obama said Thursday at the White House. “And it’s sitting there waiting for the House to pass it. Now, if the House has ideas on how to improve the Senate bill, let’s hear them. Let’s start the negotiations. But let’s not leave this problem to keep festering for another year, or two years, or three years. This can and should get done by the end of this year.”

( WATCH: Assessing the government shutdown's damage)

And yet Obama spent the bulk of his 20-minute address taking whack after whack at the same House Republicans he’ll need to pass that agenda, culminating in a jab at the GOP over the results of the 2012 election — and a dare to do better next time.

“You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position,” Obama said. “Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don’t break it. Don’t break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That’s not being faithful to what this country’s about.”

Before the shutdown, the White House had planned a major immigration push for the first week in October. But with the shutdown and looming debt default dominating the discussion during the last month, immigration reform received little attention on the Hill.

( PHOTOS: Immigration reform rally on the National Mall)

Immigration reform allies, including Obama’s political arm, Organizing for Action, conducted a series of events for the weekend of Oct. 5, most of which received little attention in Washington due to the the shutdown drama. But activists remained engaged, with Dream Act supporters staging a march up Constitution Avenue, past the Capitol to the Supreme Court Tuesday, to little notice of the Congress inside.

Obama first personally signaled his intention to re-emerge in the immigration debate during an interview Tuesday with the Los Angeles Univision affiliate, conducted four hours before his meeting that day with House Democrats.

Speaking of the week’s fiscal landmines, Obama said: “Once that’s done, you know, the day after, I’m going to be pushing to say, call a vote on immigration reform.”

( Also on POLITICO: GOP blame game: Who lost the government shutdown?)

When he met that afternoon in the Oval Office with the House Democratic leadership, Obama said that he planned to be personally engaged in selling the reform package he first introduced in a Las Vegas speech in January.

Still, during that meeting, Obama knew so little about immigration reform’s status in the House that he had to ask Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) how many members of his own party would back a comprehensive reform bill, according to a senior Democrat who attended.

The White House doesn’t have plans yet for Obama to participate in any new immigration reform events or rallies — that sort of advance work has been hamstrung by the 16-day government shutdown.

But the president emerged on Thursday to tout a “broad coalition across America” that supports immigration reform. He also invited House Republicans to add their input specifically to the Senate bill — an approach diametrically different than the House GOP’s announced strategy of breaking the reform into several smaller bills.

White House press secretary Jay Carney echoed Obama’s remarks Thursday, again using for the same language on immigration the White House used to press Republicans on the budget during the shutdown standoff: the claim that there are enough votes in the House to pass the Senate’s bill now, if only it could come to a vote.

“When it comes to immigration reform … we’re confident that if that bill that passed the Senate were put on the floor of the House today, it would win a majority of the House,” Carney said. “And I think that it would win significant Republican votes.”

Before the resolution of the shutdown and default standoff, Carney was more circumspect about the prospect of immigration reform passing the House. Earlier in the week, Carney wouldn’t venture a guess about whether the White House believes a new immigration push from the president would actually work.

“Congress is a difficult institution to make predictions about,” Carney said Wednesday. “Our view is simply that it’s the right thing to do, and we’re going to push for it.”

The earlier assessment reflects the tough reality: over on Capitol Hill, the Republicans forced to accept the fiscal deal on Obama’s terms are hardly in the mood to give the president another political victory.

Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman said House Republicans will stick with a piecemeal approach to immigration reform.

“The speaker remains committed to a common sense, step-by-step approach that ensures we get immigration reform done right,” spokesman Brendan Buck said Thursday. “That’s why the committees of the House continue to work on this important issue.”

Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), who quit the House immigration group, said there’s no chance of a bicameral reform bill getting to Obama.

“I think it would be crazy for the House Republican leadership to enter into negotiations with him on immigration,” Labrador said Wednesday. “I think what he has done over the last two and half weeks, he’s trying to destroy the Republican Party and I think that anything we negotiate right now with the president on immigration will be with that same goal in mind, which is to destroy the Republican Party and not to get good policies.”

And Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) called it “unthinkable” that Obama would press his immigration push so soon after the fiscal crises.

“All over the country, Americans are struggling to find work,” Sessions said. “It is unthinkable that the president would continue to lobby Congress on behalf of special interests in order to double the flow of immigrant workers into the country, as bills in both the House and Senate propose.”

It is exactly that sort of say-no attitude among Republicans that the White House has signaled it will highlight in its immigration push.

Obama himself said there won’t always be agreements, but in his repeated praise for “reasonable Republicans,” he made clear that he will continue to point to conservative and tea party-affiliated Republicans as the impediment to the progress he seeks — and pushing GOP lawmakers on this issue, as he did in the recent fiscal fights, to sign on to some version of the Senate’s latest compromise.

“We all know that we have divided government right now,” Obama said Thursday. “There’s a lot of noise out there, and the pressure from the extremes affect how a lot of members of Congress see the day-to-day work that’s supposed to be done here.”