'If they don’t pass the whole package, we’re going to break it up,' says Obama. Obama considers splitting jobs bill

President Barack Obama, facing a likely Senate defeat of his American Jobs Act, is prepared to work with Congress on breaking up the measure and passing proposals on a piecemeal basis, White House officials said Tuesday.

“This will be the first act in a long-term play over the next couple of months to try to force Congress to do the things that need to be done to help the economy in the short term,” one senior official told reporters in a briefing Tuesday. “The president is just going to keep making the case that the economy is far too weak now, and we need to take action to help it.”


Obama confirmed the strategy during a meeting with his jobs council in Pittsburgh. “If they don’t pass the whole package, we’re going to break it up into constituent parts,” he said. But when he delivered a speech later in the day, he turned his sights back to passing the bill in full.

“I realize some Republicans in Washington have said that even if they agreed with the ideas in the American Jobs Act, they’re wary of passing it, because it would give me a win,” Obama said in his speech, delivered at a union training center in the South Side of Pittsburgh. “Give me a win? This is not about giving me a win. … It’s about giving the American people, all of us, together, a win.”

At the same time, though, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina blasted an email to the president’s supporters denouncing Republicans’ opposition to the bill as trying “to suffocate the economy for the sake of what they think will be a political victory. They think that the more folks see Washington taking no action to create jobs, the better their chances in the next election. So they’re doing everything in their power to make sure nothing gets done.”

Messina denounced the Senate GOP’s “kamikaze political strategy” and urged Obama backers to call Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to ask him not to block a vote on the bill.

“Wait, I thought this wasn’t about politics,” McConnell spokesman Don Stewart retorted. “The White House even said so. And I believed them. I’m so naïve; I feel so used.”

Senate Democratic leaders scrambled to line up support from at least 51 Democrats for the Tuesday evening vote. But there’s a very real possibility that Democrats could fall short of a majority — an outcome that muddies the president’s strategy of blaming Republicans for congressional inaction.

The test of success, the officials said, should not be whether the bill picks up unanimous Democratic support.

“If there are zero Republicans, what message does that send to the struggling middle class in this country?” the senior official said at the briefing. “So that, to me, is the most important number. But it is clear we are going to get the vast majority of Democrats.”

“There is a bigger picture here,” the official added. “This is a very dangerous moment for the Republican Party, when you’ve got congressional approval the way it is.”

The $447 billion plan is likely to fall short of the 60 votes necessary for the Senate to open debate on the bill. A handful of vulnerable moderate Democrats are expected to join all Senate Republicans in opposing the measure, which would fund an expansion of the payroll tax cut, new infrastructure projects, small business tax credits and an extension of unemployment benefits.

The stumbling block has been the proposals for paying for the bill — 10 years in new taxes to fund one year of stimulus measures. Obama first proposed limiting itemized deductions for families that earn more than $250,000 a year, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) substituted a 5.6 percent surtax on millionaires in a bid to attract more Democrats.

White House officials said Democrats and Republicans should find common ground on what they dubbed the “do no harm” approach: renewing the payroll tax cuts for workers and unemployment compensation for another year once those expire Dec. 31.

But the officials said the president will push Congress to go further and approve billions of dollars for rehiring teachers and police officers, rebuilding roads and boosting employment of veterans.

“We will be working with the Senate to sequence which pieces they break out and when,” a second official said.

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said on MSNBC Tuesday that if Republicans block the bill, “the next step is to bring each individual piece forward and make them account for why they oppose provisions, why they oppose putting construction workers back on the job, rebuilding schools across the country, why they oppose putting teachers back to work, why they oppose tax cuts for small business and middle class families.”

Top campaign strategist David Axelrod said soon after the bill was released last month that it was “not an a la carte menu” for Congress to order from. At the same time, though, the president and his advisers in Washington signaled that he would be willing to sign his plan in pieces while calling for the rest of it to reach his desk.

Glenn Thrush contributed to this report.