Obama's tarmac tiff with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer encapsulated his mood. | AP Photos Tiff on the tarmac: Obama fights back

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — President Barack Obama’s three-day trip won’t be remembered for his talk here on rising college tuition costs. Or for his flogging of clean energy proposals in Nevada and manufacturing tax breaks in Iowa.

No, the enduring image of his tour through five key states this week will be Obama confronting Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer over months-old insults from her book, his dismissive mien facing down her French-manicured fingertip.


It was a tarmac tiff that lasted no more than a minute but encapsulated the president’s mood of the moment: fed up with the GOP.

His policy-heavy talks this week weren’t the stuff of campaign stump speeches. He didn’t level any broadsides. But his veiled attacks from Arizona to Colorado served as opening arguments for the 2012 election year and a campaign playing out on a split screen of Republican debates and stage-managed White House events.

And they revealed a president increasingly impatient with the “theater,” as one aide put it, served by his Republican opposition — whether it’s in Congress, on the campaign trail or on a tarmac in Phoenix.

“What I’ve discovered is I think it’s always good publicity for a Republican if they’re in an argument with me,” Obama said, laughing and aloof, during an ABC News interview about the Brewer incident. “But this was really not a big deal.”

Obama seemed to sense that Brewer wanted to use him as a prop. She gave him a handwritten letter inviting him to the border, replicating a similar move by Gov. Rick Perry in 2010 to confront Obama on immigration, which blew up into a mini-firestorm. But after Brewer skewered Obama in her book “Scorpions for Breakfast,” describing him as “condescending” during their last meeting, he essentially asked why he would put himself in that position again.

It was a rare moment of semi-public defiance by a president who is more often accused of being too passive. But this past week illustrated why Obama no longer feels the need to show Republicans the deference he once did.

The economy picked up steam in the last quarter. He authorized another successful Navy SEALs rescue mission on foreign soil. A new NBC News/WSJ poll showed Obama’s favorability numbers climb, while his leading Republican challengers, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, bloodied each other up and saw their negative ratings rise. Obama’s State of the Union speech was generally well received.

“He’s certainly in a very good mood,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Friday. “When you’re president, that makes for a good week.”

Fresh off his trip Friday afternoon, Obama received a token of appreciation from House Democrats, whose frustrations with the president have faded as he has turned more combative with Republicans. At their retreat in Cambridge, Md., Democrats gave Obama a recording of themselves singing Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” mimicking Obama’s performance a week ago at a fundraiser that has come to symbolize his increasing confidence.

Obama is back in the fold.

“I believe in you guys,” Obama said. “You guys have had my back through some very tough times. I’m going to have your back, as well.”

Obama urged the group to work with Republicans if they show signs of putting “politics aside for just a nanosecond in order to get something done for the American people.”

But if they don’t, he added, so be it.

“Where they obstruct, where they’re unwilling to act, where they’re more interested in party than they are in country, more interested in the next election than the next generation, then we’ve got to call them out on it,” Obama said. “We’ve got to call them out on it. We’ve got to push them. We can’t wait. We can’t be held back.”

A day earlier, Obama took on his Republican rivals in an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, telling her point blank that he will win reelection and that he wants it “badly.”

“Whoever wins the Republican primary is going to be a standard-bearer for a vision of the country that I don’t think reflects who we are,” Obama said. “I’m going to fight as hard as I can with every fiber of my being to make sure that we continue on a path that I think will restore the American dream.”

He wasn’t quite so blunt during his trip, a cross-country tour that had the look and feel of a reelection swing, even as the president tried to convince a Univision reporter Wednesday that “until the Republicans have a nominee, we don’t have a campaign.”

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, would beg to differ — and he did, at every stop the president made, assembling conference calls with reporters to decry Obama’s “taxpayer-paid campaign visit” to Michigan and each of the four other states.

“Here’s the problem with this president: He travels the country not promoting policies that will get Americans back to work but giving the same old stump speech full of failed economic policies and broken promises,” Priebus said Friday.

Obama kept his frustration with the GOP more oblique: In six speeches over three days, the word “Republican” didn’t cross Obama’s lips once, other than in neutral terms when he spoke about values that both parties held. Instead, he referred to them as “a lot of folks” or “the other side.”

Still, the targets of his message were indisputable: Romney, Gingrich and the rest of the GOP pack in Congress and on the campaign trail.

They are defenders of the wealthy, Obama said repeatedly, willing to cut government benefits for the middle class and senior citizens to protect tax benefits for millionaires and billionaires.

Expect to hear more of it.

“This is one of the biggest things I’m going to be pushing back against this year is this notion that somehow this is class warfare, that we’re trying to stir up envy,” Obama said at the House Democratic retreat.

He showed a degree of self-assurance that was evident earlier in the week on the tarmac in Phoenix. After Brewer jabbed her finger at him, he chose to walk away, flinging the letter in his presidential limousine before making a beeline to a group of adoring supporters.