Talk show host Glenn Beck, left, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, right, are among those President Barack Obama has recently held up for scorn. | AP photo composite by POLITICO Obama strategy gets personal

Mitch McConnell is in bed with Wall Street “movers and shakers” — and is fronting “cynical and deceptive” arguments on their behalf.

John Boehner is a health care Chicken Little to be mocked for predicting Armageddon if the Democrats’ reform bill passed.


Sarah Palin can be ignored on arms control because she’s “not exactly an expert on nuclear issues.”

And Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are just a “troublesome” twosome spreading “vitriol.”

Democratic oppo research? Comments from Daily Kos?

No, this is your president speaking.

Once chastised for not being tough enough, President Barack Obama has lately been getting personal with his political adversaries — singling them out for scorn in speeches, interviews, asides and even in his weekly radio address.

Rather than just going after big groups of bad guys — insurance companies, lobbyists, the media — Obama has adopted a strategy that gives a face to the enemy.

By setting himself up against specific opponents, he provides a point of contrast that’s useful in invigorating a base hungry for bare knuckles and bravado — and forces those in the middle to choose between him and his villain du jour.

“He lost some of his spunk and fight. He lost what he had in the campaign. When you campaign, you campaign against people,” said Paul Stob, a Vanderbilt professor who co-operates the website www.presidentialrhetoric.com. “I think there have been very conscious decisions to get back to that.”

With his approval numbers flat-lining near the 50 percent mark in recent months — and Democrats trailing Republicans by double digits among independents in recent surveys — the president and his congressional allies could use a boost among both core Democratic constituencies and folks who feel no particular allegiance to either party.

Republicans say the president’s return to confrontational, campaign-style politics is beneath his office.

“The presidency is the highest office of the land, and when he differs, he should differ on policy [and] on principle,” said Ari Fleischer, who was the White House press secretary under President George W. Bush. “He’s entitled to fight and defend himself, but not in ad hominem personal style. It’s unseemly for a president to do that.”

Republicans also depict Obama’s approach as a sign of weakness born of a loss of traction on the issues.

“Name-calling isn’t typically done from a position of strength,” McConnell spokesman Josh Holmes said.

Deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton describes a West Wing that gets personal when Obama’s aides believe the other side is distorting the truth — and the media are playing along.

“When he was a candidate, President Obama said as president he would tell people what they needed to hear not just what they wanted to hear. And that includes telling hard truths to folks who are his friends and who are his political opponents,” Burton said.

He said that Obama was “taking on something that just wasn’t true” in calling out McConnell on Wall Street regulation, which the Senate minority leader and some of his colleagues have labeled a taxpayer bailout bill. “We went through a campaign where you saw if you didn’t answer charges they could really infect coverage and what people thought about particular issues. In this case the president decided to just take it straight on.”

By definition, the leader of the free world is punching down when he squares off against an individual foe. And therein lies the risk, say students of presidential rhetoric.

“He can look undignified,” said John Murphy, a political scientist at the University of Illinois. “It’s really got to be context-dependent.”

Target, timing and tone are all important variables in whether a president is successful in taking on an adversary personally.

“It’s not unusual for presidents to be happy warriors in domestic political debates. If they’re going to call out an opponent, probably the best strategy to follow is to pick on someone of stature and to say it with a smile,” said David Kusnet, who was President Bill Clinton’s chief speechwriter. “The leader of the other party in the U.S. Senate or some hugely important media figure, and you can measure importance by audience, those targets are well within the tradition of targets that other presidents have taken on.”

The classic example, he said, is President Franklin Roosevelt’s use of the cadent “Martin, Barton and Fish” to identify conservatives who blocked his foreign policy in Congress in the run-up to the 1940 election.

Generally, Obama has been deft in his derision of political foes. For example, the House minority leader’s prediction that the health care law would begin Armageddon gave Obama a chance to note the absence of asteroids and earthquakes in the wake of its enactment.

But sometimes his barbs can be a tad acidic — as they were when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Obama to respond to Palin’s critique of his plan to reduce the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

“I really have no response,” Obama said. “Because last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on nuclear issues. ... [I]f the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it, I’m probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.”

For a while last year, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor appeared to be White House enemy No. 1.

Burton said it’s not as well-planned as that.

“We don’t have a meeting every time the president uses someone’s name or doesn’t use someone’s name. It’s a matter of taking on things that aren’t true and making sure people have the information they need to make their own determinations about policies or issues,” Burton said. “The president makes all the final decisions on what he’s going to say.”

But those instances appear to be on the increase, perhaps in response to Democratic complaints that Obama wasn’t willing to fight.

“Earlier, President Obama was criticized for not having the resolve to fight for what he wants,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University professor who studies White House communication. “That is not an image he wants to take hold as it will compromise his ability to lead. Presidents need to instill some fear in their critics. He has a difficult agenda to move forward and he needs to define his critics if he can.”

Rather than backing down in the face of Obama’s criticism, Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn accused the president of “demeaning himself and his office.”

Fleischer said Bush preferred not to engage opponents directly.

“President Bush instructed me never to go after anybody by name or an individual, to keep it broad,” Fleischer said.

Burton says the White House decides on a case-by-case basis whether to identify an individual adversary.

“In the McConnell case, it was just crystal clear that he was, in many venues, making an argument that just frankly was not true and so the president took it on,” Burton said.

Wall Street regulation isn’t the first issue that’s driven Obama to engage McConnell directly. In March, the Senate minority leader became a whipping boy for Obama on health care.

When someone shouted out during a St. Louis fundraiser that month, Obama replied “Was that Mitch McConnell? ... They don’t like it when we’re talking the truth.”

While the one-on-one attack is good fodder for riling up his party’s base, Fleischer said, “most Americans are sick of it.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) underscored the delicate nature of personal attacks Monday by trying to clarify what he meant when he went after McConnell the other day.

“Mr. President, last week I criticized the Republican leader for the way he was handling Wall Street reform. I even criticized him for a series of meetings he held in New York and the result of the meetings. I want the record to be very clear, however, I in no way was impugning the integrity of my friend from Kentucky,” Reid said after he and his aides spent a week blistering McConnell — and after Reid had been in New York for fundraisers. “The senior senator from Kentucky and I have fundamental policy differences on a number of issues, but no one should take my disagreement with my friend to question his honesty.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele seized on Reid’s walk-back.

“Now that Sen. Reid has apologized for personal attacks made towards Sen. McConnell,” he asked in a statement, “when will President Obama do the same?”