Obama's body language is more combative than the gentler negotiating style of yore. Why Obama isn't caving

President Barack Obama’s stiffening resolve during the fight over the fiscal cliff can be traced directly to the lessons he drew from his hard-won triumph of the 2012 campaign.

He whipped Republicans a second time, parried the best attacks they could muster, and is now demanding that they respect the victory, if not the man who won it. That doesn’t mean Obama won’t eventually compromise, especially with the specter of a renewed recession lingering just over the horizon, but his body language is a lot more combative than the kinder, gentler Obama negotiating style of yore.


His new toughness is rooted in the nature of his convincing November win over Mitt Romney. Obama was carried to the finish line by supporters after his epic flop at the Denver debate. That seeded in him a greater sense of confidence and deepened his resolve not to be rolled by a recalcitrant GOP, as he was during the bitter 2011 fight over the debt ceiling, according to interviews with staffers and friends for “The End of the Line,” an eBook published in collaboration between POLITICO and Random House.

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After his 2008 win, he talked a lot about bipartisanship. This time he’s determined to squeeze it out of Republicans. He believes he owes that to the people who voted for him.

“There’s no doubt that he found this one to be sweeter than the last one,” said one of Obama’s top aides. “It was weighing on him how much was at stake, how much of his entire legacy was on the line. His legacy had not been determined by the previous four years; that wouldn’t matter to history. It was all about the outcome on Election Day.”

With that outcome now in the history books, the people around the president now see him as a Democratic Reagan, a resilient and popular figure who can unify the country — if only the dead-enders will give him a chance.

When the book’s authors asked David Plouffe, Obama’s most influential political adviser, whether the campaign’s organizational success could be replicated with other Democrats, he sprang forward in his chair. “The organization doesn’t exist without belief in the candidate … they turned out for Barack Obama,” he said. “It was all because of him.”

But the buzz from Election Day has proven to be remarkably brief. The White House has been thrust from its post-victory reverie into a Groundhog Day partisan battle that makes any talk of a new “mandate” seem laughable. Romney was a comprehensible threat Obama had gamed out for nearly two years. A fractious, collapsing GOP House majority leaves him in a much more dangerous and uncertain position, at least in the short term.

So far, he’s staked out a tough position, refusing to get too specific on spending and entitlement cuts, and threatening GOP leaders — whose popularity is tanking — with the bully pulpit of his inauguration and State of the Union speech. But many Hill Democrats, accustomed to seeing Obama give in, remain only cautiously optimistic.

“So far, so good. [But] we’ll see how this shakes out,” said a top Senate Democrat, who is queasy about the administration’s overtures to the GOP on entitlement reform.

At a White House news conference on Thursday, an exasperated Obama urged his congressional rivals not to let their feelings for him derail a deal to avert the fiscal cliff.

“[I]t is very hard for them to say yes to me,” the president said when discussing the right wing’s opposition to tax hikes — a position on remarkable display Thursday night, when House Speaker John Boehner had to pull his Plan B for a millionaires tax.

“[A]t some point, they’ve got to take me out of it and think about their voters, and think about what’s best for the country. And if they do that — if they’re not worried about who’s winning and who’s losing, did they score a point on the president, did they extract that last little concession, did they force him to do something he really doesn’t want to do just for the heck of it, and they focus on actually what’s good for the country.”

Republicans say that’s just more proof he’s a narcissist: Their opposition is motivated by a philosophical antipathy to tax hikes, and not any hatred of him.

Yet the lesson of 2012, fresh in the minds of Obama’s team, was one of a candidate who surrendered some of his “I’m LeBron” ego after witnessing the stunning outpouring of support following his lowest moment as a candidate for the presidency: the Oct. 3 debate in Denver.

Sure, Obama had been grateful for all the hard work on his behalf in 2008, but “I got this” was his creed back then.

The campaign had been all about Obama, who seemed less a politician than a runaway popular phenomenon. That aspect of his fame had always bothered him a little, the “Gangnam Style” trendiness of it all.

He’d had an itch, a nagging sense that underneath the momentary adulation, people weren’t really voting for him but against George W. Bush. For all its negativity, missteps and anxiety, 2012 scratched it.

In 2012, he internalized the “Yes we can” credo as he’d never quite done before.

On Election Night, when his top advisers, including Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, griped about Romney’s foot-dragging on the concession speech, Obama seemed unperturbed, even serene, according to several top aides interviewed days after the election for “The End of the Line.”

“Why isn’t he calling?” Jarrett asked Obama’s group in the presidential suite atop Chicago’s Fairmont Hotel. “We gotta go! We gotta go!”

Obama tried to calm everybody down.

“Don’t push … This is hard. He’ll call, don’t worry,” he said, according to one of his top aides. “Look, he needs to do this in his own time.”

Obama had, after all, been vindicated. His enemies had failed — all the birthers, the tea party obstructionists who had written his obituary after the 2010 midterms, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had vowed to make him a one-term president like Jimmy Carter.

Toward the end of the campaign, Obama, who had been automatonic and disengaged for much of the preceding six months, emerged as a much more overtly emotional candidate.

The transformation showed on two levels. On one hand, he was more openly contemptuous of Romney and other Republicans — aides noticed a nearly complete absence of any serious discussion about reaching out to the GOP post-election, as he had pledged to four years earlier. On the other hand, he seemed like a changed man to the people who buoyed him when he was at his lowest ebb.

In the days after the Denver debate, he went from staffer to staffer, apologizing personally and promising to do better the next time — a ritual of presidential contrition that creeped out aides accustomed to dealing with a more Spock-like boss.

Obama put on a brave face, but those who knew him best could see that beneath the surface self-assurance he’d been deeply shaken by Denver, more rattled than anyone outside the team suspected.

“It really kicked his ass … He was in the dumps,” one top aide said shortly after.

Obama’s campaign had always consisted of an interlocking team of specialists. In 2008, the role of Obama whisperer, manager of the candidate’s psyche, had most often fallen to Robert Gibbs, an outgoing former college soccer goalie who shared Obama’s view of politics as an extension of competitive sports.

Gibbs was a paid campaign surrogate, but he played a much reduced role in 2012, due to a heavy schedule of well-paying public speaking gigs and lingering awkwardness from his early-2011 departure from the White House.

After Denver, Gibbs — with Plouffe’s knowledge — began emailing with the president on Obama’s secure BlackBerry to get a better sense of where Obama was in his head.

Obama, who tightens his circle of friends and advisers during tough times, surprised Gibbs by inviting him to lunch on the patio outside the Oval Office on Oct. 12, the Friday before the second presidential debate at Long Island’s Hofstra University.

Gibbs thought long and hard about how to approach the meeting. Then he remembered: Of all the constraints the presidency imposed, one that Obama hated most was not getting to drive. Gibbs vividly recalled a 2010 visit he’d made with Obama to GM’s new factory in Hamtramck, Mich., where the all-electric Volt was being built.

The president had looked longingly at the car, like a boy watching another kid unwrap a Christmas present. Gibbs just happened to have one sitting in his driveway, a silver 2011 model.

When lunch was over, Gibbs told Obama he had a surprise and escorted him onto the South Lawn and the glassy blacktop of the circular driveway where the car was parked. Then the leader of the free world hopped into the driver’s seat and made three snail-slow laps.

Obama, his mood and attitude much improved after his successful Hofstra debate, savored the last two weeks of the campaign — the farewell performance of one of the nation’s most singular political performers.

The brooding, bungling and apologetic Obama had been replaced by a mellower, happier warrior. The week before Election Day, Obama packed Air Force One with old friends for a sentimental farewell tour of Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa. It would be the last time he’d ever campaign for office, and he wanted to see all the familiar faces: Gibbs, Eric Whitaker, and Marty Nesbitt from Chicago; his beloved 2008 body man, Reggie Love; and Mike Ramos, his childhood buddy from the Punahou School in Honolulu.

Obama was so confident he’d win, he even allowed himself a few moments of sympathy for an opponent he didn’t especially like or respect.

“I have a feeling for Romney and the people with him,” he said, according to a staffer within earshot. “This won’t be easy for them.”

Later that day, as the sun set on his last day of campaigning, he choked up at a final rally in Des Moines, a tear rolling down his cheek as he looked at all those familiar faces from the 2008 caucuses.

“I saw him get more emotional in that last week than I had in the previous six, seven years combined,” one top adviser told the authors of “The End of the Line.”

That attitude, along with a deep weariness, has been sustained as he returns, full-time, to the Oval Office. Obama seems like he now owns, rather than rents, the office.

With that has come easier access to his emotions publicly. In the aftermath of the Connecticut school massacre, Obama has delivered two of the most memorable and heartfelt speeches of his presidency.

“Each time I learn the news, I react not as a president but as anybody else would, as a parent,” Obama said during an emotional three-minute statement to reporters in the White House briefing room as news of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., paralyzed the nation.

“The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old,” Obama said, bowing his head as cameras captured his pain and his tears.

But if the 2012 election increased the president’s comfort with public emotion, it also strengthened his desire to ensure that the GOP — a party that has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections — doesn’t get a better deal than they have earned.

And that means Obama is likely to employ the same mindset that won him a second term: a determination to pursue a core political strategy regardless of the news cycle, tactical shifts by the opposition or external pressure.

During the 2012 campaign, Plouffe was the man most responsible for keeping the Chicago campaign apparatus on task — and is the man now helping to guide president’s fiscal cliff strategy during his final weeks as Obama’s right-hand man in the West Wing.

Plouffe’s mantra during the campaign?

“We’ve got a plan. We’ll win if we don’t f—- it up.”