Obama keeps running into the same wall of insurmountable opposition. Obama, boxed in

There are two very different President Obamas.

There’s the confident, uncompromising Obama who sought to shame and bully Republicans into submitting to his agenda of tax increases and sweeping gun reform. This version of Obama was dominant until one month ago.


Then there’s the calmer, more compromising Obama — the one who has courted Republicans and taken on his own party with a call for (modest) reductions in entitlement spending. This version of Obama took command last month.

Both are flailing.

( PHOTOS: The two sides of Barack Obama)

Obama, regardless of the personality and political approach he displays on any given day, keeps running into the same wall of insurmountable opposition. The cold, hard reality is that the president is trapped in a very frustrating box: He realizes that the vast majority of Congress is as impervious to his pressure as it is his charm. He is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t — and he knows it, several of his friends tell us.

He will most likely get nothing on guns despite his vow after Wednesday’s Senate defeat that “this effort is not over.” He will most likely get nothing more on a grand bargain to lift the economy. He stands a decent chance of getting an immigration deal. But as one influential Democratic adviser told us, that’s only because the president has largely stayed on the sidelines. “POTUS really doesn’t have any sway with red-state Dems,” said a top Democratic official close to the White House. Democratic senators, the official added, “won in states that POTUS lost — some by huge margins. Also, even in blue states, many Democrats ran ahead of POTUS.”

( Also on POLITICO: Obama's mission: Reassure, rally)

Obama has privately resigned himself to this bleak reality — in fact, he anticipated it more than a year ago. In private conversations during the campaign, Obama made plain that the job of being president was a drag under divided government — and that he had deep reservations about grinding out another two or four years of minimal progress through a gridlocked Congress. Now, the combination of Republican resistance and the high number of Senate Democrats running in red states in 2014 virtually assures little change for at least 18 months.

David Axelrod, sounding shell-shocked by the decisiveness of the Senate defeat on gun reform, said Obama is indeed frustrated by the constraints that bind him and knows that’s what he signed up for. “On this one, he tried everything,” Axelrod said. “It’s easy after a stinging defeat like this to say: ‘There’s no formula.’ But what you can’t do is take your bat and ball and go home.”

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Obama advisers see at least three options:

1. Work like hell to flip the House.

The only way to get big things done in a divided Congress is to control everything, like Obama did for his first two years. Democrats would need to net 17 House seats, a near impossibility for an incumbent president’s party in the so-called six-year itch year. The forecast from Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball project at the University of Virginia Center for Politics lists only seven of the nation’s 435 House districts as true tossups. The analysis points to an amazing stat that explains a lot about Capitol Hill gridlock: Just 26 House members — 17 Democrats and nine Republicans — represent districts won by the other party’ presidential candidate, and many of the members in those crossover districts are not particularly vulnerable.

2. Fight like hell for immigration — and issue lots of executive orders.

David Plouffe — architect of Obama’s first presidential race and a senior adviser in the White House for the first term — is cautiously optimistic about immigration since it seems to be in a very different place politically than gun control was. “Passing immigration reform would be a ringing start to a second term,” Plouffe said.

The Democratic official close to the White House pointed out that immigration “has more political upside for a Republican than guns does — not passing immigration is more of a downside for Republicans than the upside of blocking it. … If we can pass it with 70 votes, then the House will look like racist white boys if they don’t pass it.”

Plouffe said some of Obama’s goals will require legislative action but added that the president plans to accomplish others with his administrative powers, continuing the 44 executive actions on everything from transit to tourism that Obama has taken under his “wait can’t wait” umbrella since late 2011.

“The first preference is always to work with Congress,” Plouffe said. “If they won’t act, and we can, we will.”

3. Take the long view.

As the country shifts to center-left, the president will appear to be on the right side of history. It might take years to enact gun controls or raise more taxes on the rich or make gay marriage legal everywhere. But Obama will be able to claim credit for getting these tectonic changes rolling — or at least shoving them along. Guns are Exhibit A.

“If it’s not a matter of principle and conscience, it’s a matter of calculus,” Axelrod said. “The fear senators have from the NRA is that they’ll lose their seats. But if they realize that the voters will back them up, and people begin losing seats because they voted against something as common-sensical as background checks, you’ll start seeing changes.”