Despite all the fire pointed at Republicans by the White House, the GOP is hardly Obama's biggest headache. | AP photo composite by POLITICO Obama mixes it up in health-care brawl

President Barack Obama dove into the political street-fight threatening his signature issue Monday — taking aim at a first-term Republican senator in hopes of rallying Democrats increasingly nervous about Obama-style reform.

The White House opened an aggressive three-week push for health care legislation before the August recess with Obama attacking Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) for saying health care might be Obama’s “Waterloo.” Obama’s press secretary and national party chairman picked up on the line of attack as well.


Republicans responded in kind Monday — with Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele describing Obama’s health care plan as a “multitrillion-dollar experiment” and his administration’s approach as socialism.

But for all the fire pointed their way by the White House, Republicans are hardly Obama’s biggest headache. His problems lately have come from within his own party, as divided House and Senate caucuses have shown a surprising willingness to buck Obama on his top domestic priority just six months into his presidency.

Obama seems mindful of the problem — and was clearly hoping Monday that he could stir up Democrats’ anger toward DeMint’s comments, perhaps even long enough for them to forget all the things that worry them about Obama’s plans for reform.

DeMint said Friday on a conservative conference call that “if we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

On Monday, Obama responded, quoting DeMint’s line word for word. “Think about that. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America’s families, breaking America’s businesses and breaking America’s economy. And we can’t afford the politics of delay and defeat when it comes to health care, not this time, not now.”

Later in an interview with PBS’s Jim Lehrer, Obama even invoked the memory of Hillary Clinton’s failed attempt to overhaul health care in the 1990s — with a warning that Republicans used Clinton’s defeat as a springboard back to power.

“They explicitly went after the Clintons, said we’re not going to get this done,” Obama said. “So it was a pure political play, a show of strength by the Republicans that helped them regain the House. I think there are folks who think that we should try to dust off that old playbook.”

And in an unusual move, he made a personal appeal to a handful of progressive bloggers during a late afternoon conference call to keep up the pressure on lawmakers and debunk false information about his plan.

"I know the blogs are best at debunking myths that can slip through a lot of the traditional media outlets," he said, according to the Huffington Post. "And that is why you are going to play such an important role in our success in the weeks to come."

For his part, DeMint pushed back at Obama’s remarks Monday with a statement saying, “Let’s be clear: There is no one in this debate advocating that we do nothing despite the president’s constant straw man arguments.”

The Democratic concerns run deep — so deep that it’s not clear that a political pitch from the president can ease their worries, given their substantive problems with the plan.

“The president has to do what he feels will work to get the legislation moving,” said Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who has joined with two Democrats, two Republicans and one independent to ask for additional time on the bill. “What the six of us want is a bipartisan piece of legislation. There were enough people concerned about it that we ought to say something. The complexities of the bill are incredible.”

It doesn’t help that Obama is now seeing some of the lowest polling in his presidency — with his approval rating drifting back toward mere-mortal status and the public giving him lower marks on health care, specifically, than they have in recent months. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday found public approval of Obama’s handling of health care dipped below 50 percent for the first time – with 49 percent saying they approve and 44 percent saying they disapprove.

And the cold reality for the White House is that it’s on a 3½-year schedule while lawmakers in the fight have their eyes on a different calendar, the 2010 midterms. And that’s led to some serious nervousness among people who are usually among Obama’s biggest fans.

Take House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.). On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday, he said he wants to delay the tax hike to pay for health care, even though the White House has said it’s open to the idea.

“Republicans I’ve spoken with are very concerned about this surcharge. I’m concerned about that, too,” Clyburn said. “We’ve had six listening sessions of our members and we have come away from those sessions believing we can do this with the savings that we get out of the system. ... I don’t think we have to have the surcharge at all. There are a lot of Democrats on our side who believe that.”

He said Democrats are working on crafting a trigger for the millionaires’ tax that he doesn’t think will need to be pulled.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also backed off the idea, saying the proposed surcharge on the wealthy should apply to individuals who earn $500,000 and couples who earn at least $1 million. The bill now moving through the House would raise taxes for individuals with annual adjusted gross incomes of $280,000, or families that make $350,000 or more.

At the outset of another critical drafting process on Monday, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) knocked down a rumor that moderate Democrats were forcing the committee to suspend consideration of the health care bill until the Senate approves its own version.

“We’re in the markup,” Waxman said in response to a question about the rumor from Texas Rep. Joe Barton, the ranking Republican on the panel. “We’ll continue with the markup.”

Waxman met with Democrats in the Blue Dog Coalition before the markup session on Monday to discuss their concerns with the bill, aides said. Blue Dogs would like more time to work through all the concerns they have with the bill, but those negotiations will continue as the committee consideration continues, aides said.

Desperate to shift the debate away from Washington arcana like Congressional Budget Office scoring or pay-as-you-go budgeting rules, Democrats have scheduled a series of press conferences to focus on the everyday effect their bill would have on patients, doctors and other medical providers.

But party leaders remain focused on shoring up support among moderates, freshmen and rural Democrats so they can move a bill out of the House.

A bipartisan group of Senate Finance Committee negotiators still need to find $200 billion to pay for the bill, senators said Monday.

“I don’t see it as possible,” said Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), referring to whether the Finance Committee could hold a markup this week.

But senators said their staffs worked through the weekend -- and made progress, receiving a slate of new revenue options from White House budget director Peter Orszag. Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said the group was reviewing the ideas.

The committee is also taking a close look at taxing insurers that offer high-end plans -- a variation on the idea of taxing employer-provided health benefits, which Democratic congressional leaders ruled out two weeks ago. Under the latest proposal, which was offered by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the tax would apply to plans that exceed a certain cost threshold. Critics say the tax would be passed onto consumers through higher premiums.

Meanwhile, Republicans finally think they have Obama in a tough spot.

Conservative columnist William Kristol, an architect of the Republican plan to kill Bill Clinton’s health care reform effort in 1994, told his party in a Weekly Standard blog post Monday to “go for the kill.”

DeMint made his remarks on a call last week organized by the group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, which opposes Obama’s plans for health care reform.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs defended Obama’s tactic of directly engaging DeMint and went a step further, singling out Kristol as one of those Republicans who are peddling “a breathtaking message.”

Obama “could just have easily have quoted a Republican strategist today who said to go for the kill and asked opponents to resist the temptation to be responsible,” Gibbs said, referring to Kristol’s blog post, which also urges opponents of Obama’s reform plans to resist the temptation “to let up on their criticism, and to try to appear constructive, or at least responsible.”

“If that’s the message that they want to have, that’s certainly their business, but understand that delay means real things,” Gibbs said, noting that there are voters in DeMint’s state who want health care reform. “There clearly are those that want to oppose this purely to continue the 40-year-old Washington gamesmanship of playing politics on health care.”

Patrick O’Connor contributed to this story.