The White House's plan relies almost entirely on the president’s ability to persuade. | REUTERS Obama's sequester strategy: Shame

President Barack Obama’s sequester strategy is all about one word: shame.

With the parties at an impasse on stopping across-the-board budget cuts set to hit March 1, the White House is prepping another multimedia, cross-country drive to stoke public outrage against congressional Republicans.


Certain that the political winds are in their favor, they’re forgoing serious negotiations for a high-risk public offensive, banking almost entirely on the president’s ability to persuade. They believe that the GOP will be scared of taking the blame from an angry public — and the White House says this is just the kind of thing that gave them the victory they claimed in the fiscal cliff fight and the most recent standoff over the debt limit.

The aim is to force Republicans to submit to new revenue as part of a deal to avert the $1.2 trillion in potential cuts — and the only way to get there, senior administration officials said, is by making the GOP position indefensible.

( Also on POLITICO: Lawmakers go NIMBY on sequester)

Obama will hold events at the White House with constituencies facing the brunt of the cuts, and travel to places where the deepest cuts loom. His aides hinted Tuesday at releasing data in the next few days that break down the damage state by state.

“That’s the choice,” Obama said Tuesday while surrounded by first responders, a constituency that neither party wants to be seen as hurting. “Are you willing to see a bunch of first responders lose their job because you want to protect some special interest tax loophole? Are you willing to have teachers laid off, or kids not have access to Head Start, or deeper cuts in student loan programs just because you want to protect a special tax interest loophole that the vast majority of Americans don’t benefit from? That’s the choice. That’s the question.”

( Also on POLITICO: Obama decries sequester)

Senior administration officials projected confidence Tuesday during a background briefing with reporters. One official said Republicans are in a worse position than during the fiscal cliff fight, arguing that the only thing more popular than raising tax rates on the wealthy is closing loopholes that benefit them.

But if Republicans hold to their cuts-only approach — as they insist they will — and the sequester kicks in, Obama could face a fiscal crisis that threatens to tank the economy and sideline his top legislative priorities such as immigration reform and gun control.

The early signs aren’t encouraging for the president.

In the face of the planned escalation in pressure from the White House, House Republicans feel no compulsion to do anything — at all.

( Also on POLITICO: OP slams Obama sequester speech)

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) think they’ve done their job by passing a bill last Congress to replace the sequester cuts, and they’re content with blaming the president, since Bob Woodward reported that the White House staff devised the idea of sequester before House and Senate leadership pushed it through the Capitol.

“The president is going to try and pretend that his enemy on this is us,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner. “His enemy is reality. The president created the sequester and insisted on it, House Republicans have acted twice to replace it. If there’s going to be a solution here, he’s going to have to work with his own political party in the Senate.”

House Republicans face an incredibly complicated political and legislative situation.

Boehner, Cantor and McCarthy constantly tell reporters that this is “Obama’s sequester” and that House Republicans have passed a bill to replace the cuts. They often fail to acknowledge that the bill has expired because it passed last Congress. There is some concern in leadership about making moderate Republicans vote for the cut-heavy plan again.

Members of the House Armed Services Committee and other defense-friendly Republicans privately griped to POLITICO that they are insulted by that message, since Boehner privately assured them in 2011 that they should accept the sequester because it would never go into effect. Boehner, Republican lawmakers told POLITICO, shouldn’t try to lay the blame of the cuts at the president’s feet.

How those lawmakers react in the next few weeks will dictate how the House fixes the sequester — and Obama plans to nudge them along with a relentless campaign.

“That’s his card,” said Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic strategist who ran a pro-Obama super PAC in the 2012 election. “He wasn’t known as a legislative craftsman on the Hill. He is wise to play to his strengths.”

Obama wants Republicans to agree to replace the indiscriminate cuts of the sequester with better-targeted spending reductions and new revenues from closing loopholes, such as tax breaks for corporate jet owners, oil and gas companies, hedge fund managers and prescription drug companies.

There is no shortage of reasons why House Republicans are opposed to new tax revenue. They say they gave Obama more revenue during the fiscal cliff debate. Republicans — chiefly Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp of Michigan — hold out hope for tax reform. Closing loopholes before tax reform makes a comprehensive overhaul more difficult.

House Republicans privately say they don’t view March 1 as a deadline to replace the sequester cuts, but instead the end of March — closely tied to the expiration of the continuing resolution that currently funds the government.

Republicans say they may put another bill on the floor to replace the cuts after the sequester hits, but there are no plans to put a new legislative fix before the cuts take hold.

In part, the GOP is concerned about another vote to cut deep into social programs — especially in advance of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s next budget, which will attempt to bring the nation’s books into balance in the next decade.

Short of replacing the cuts, the House majority is trying to take preventive measures to make the sequester less drastic.

Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) is looking to craft a government funding bill that would give the Defense Department more flexibility when the sequester hits. But Boehner hasn’t decided whether he should endorse that approach, because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) would most likely amend that bill and send it back to the House, threatening a messy government shutdown fight that the Ohio Republican is seeking to avoid.

But for now, a Senate Democratic leadership aide said that even Senate Democrats are waiting on the president to change the political dynamics.

“There is a resignation setting in that it looks less and less likely that we can get Republicans to seriously negotiate on this to turn it off,” the aide said. “He needs to make them feel the heat so they feel the need to return to the negotiating table.”