Barack Obama has performed his act of contrition; now comes the hard part. | REUTERS Obama isolated ahead of 2012

President Barack Obama has performed his act of contrition. Now comes the hard part, according to Democrats around the country: reckoning with the simple fact that he’s isolated himself from virtually every group that matters in American politics.

Congressional Democrats consider him distant and blame him for their historic defeat on Tuesday. Democratic state party leaders scoff at what they see as an inattentive and hapless political operation. Democratic lobbyists feel maligned by his holier-than-thou take on their profession. His own Cabinet — with only a few exceptions — has been marginalized.


His relations with business leaders could hardly be worse. Obama has suggested it’s a PR problem, but several Democratic officials said CEOs friendly with the president walk away feeling he’s indifferent at best to their concerns. Add in his icy relations with Republicans, the media and, most important, most voters, and it’s easy to understand why his own staff leaked word to POLITICO that it wants Obama to shake up his staff and change his political approach.

It should be a no-brainer for a humbled Obama to move quickly after Tuesday’s thumping to try to repair these damaged relations, and indeed, in India on Sunday, he acknowledged the need for “midcourse corrections.”

But many Democrats privately say they are skeptical that Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic changes they feel are needed — in his relations with other Democrats or in his very approach to the job.

In his effort to change Washington, Obama has failed to engage Washington and its institutions and customs, leaving him estranged from the capital’s permanent power structure — right at the moment when Democrats say he must rethink his strategy for cultivating and nurturing relations with key constituencies ahead of 2012.

“This guy swept to power on a wave of adulation, and he learned the wrong lessons from that,” said a Democratic official who deals frequently with the White House. “He’s more of a movement leader than a politician. He needs someone to kick his ass on things large and small and teach him to be a politician.”

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) expressed a much deeper frustration to POLITICO: that the president never had House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s back — and it cost both of them. “They not only failed to defend her and her accomplishments on their behalf,” said Miller of the White House, “they failed to defend themselves.”

Tuesday’s losses have left high-level Democrats feeling freer to open up about White House missteps over the past two years — complaints that were repressed when Obama was strong but now are being aired as clues to his team’s isolation as he tries to regain command of the capital after his midterm thrashing.

Consider state party leaders. Many feel slighted by a president they helped elect. The slights are both big and small. In July, Obama was visiting GM and Chrysler plans in the Detroit area and invited the local House member — but other Democratic lawmakers who stood to benefit from the exposure were left in the cold.

"President Obama has done a lot for the people of Michigan, including rescuing state services and saving GM and Chrysler,” said former Michigan Gov. Jim Blanchard, a Democrat and Obama supporter. “We'd like to see a political operation in Michigan commensurate with his achievements."

Other Democrats are fuming at Obama’s decision not to endorse the Democratic candidate for governor of Rhode Island — and shun conventional political interactions, including refusing to meet with a group of black ministers at a campaign event this fall.

This is problematic because in a 50-50 country, political infrastructure matters — and the consensus among Democratic consultants is that Obama has allowed theirs to atrophy by neglect.

Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee Alex Sink took it further, hitting a “tone-deaf” Obama White House to explain why she narrowly lost her campaign, saying the administration mishandled the BP oil spill and hasn’t fully grasped the political damage done by Obama’s health care reform push. “They just need to be better listeners and be better at reaching out to people who are on the ground to hear about the realities of their policies as well as politics,” Sink told POLITICO.

On their own, some gripes about Obama look like little more than trivial violations of Politics 101. But they have had the cumulative effect of leaving the president and his team isolated from many of the constituencies required for success in Washington:

— When Obama was giving the commencement address in the University of Michigan’s “Big House” stadium last May, he mingled in the home-team locker room with university deans and regents. Across the tunnel, in the visitors' locker room, several members of Michigan’s Democratic congressional delegation — including Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin and House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. — waited patiently.

Some had brought grandchildren so they could get their picture taken with the president. But they never got to see him. Obama didn’t cross the tunnel to see the lawmakers.

— In June, during an East Room reception for top supporters at Ford’s Theatre, several of the attendees were disappointed that they didn’t get to shake the president’s hand and take a photo, as they had in the past. Instead, Obama greeted a few people down front, reaching over a rope line.

“People thought they were going to a reception with the president, not a campaign event,” one attendee recalled.

— One veteran Democrat recalled a group of Obama donors who were chatting at last December’s State Department holiday party, hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “Half of them were upset because they had not been invited to a White House party,” this Democrat recalled. “The [other] half was upset because they had been invited to the White House and were kept behind a rope line instead of getting to greet the president.”

— The president invited Senate chairmen and ranking members over for dinner in March 2009 but came in after they were seated and went back to the residence without shaking hands or visiting each table.

One well-known Democrat summed up the cost of the slights and the seeming indifference to basic political courtesies this way: “These are little things that are not going to affect public perceptions. But it affects the infrastructure of how you put together a campaign. These are the people that you need to raise money, to give money, to organize, to show up, to speak out.”

Several top Democrats explained that Obama’s unorthodox ascent in 2008 left him with little appreciation for the conventional machinery that most ambitious natural politicians nurture obsessively.

“Because Hillary had all the institutional support [in the primaries], he came here without a support structure,” said one Democratic lobbyist. “They made a decision that was a good thing and tried to go around all those institutional players. But as a president, you can co-opt a lot of those constituencies. You don't have to be captured by them."

The problems run deeper. Big-dollar donors and liberal special interests feel used, and only in the past month has the White House made an effort to play nicer with them. Some donors contend the White House should have encouraged its own counterpart to the outside GOP groups like American Crossroads, rather than griping about the new competition.

Democratic lobbyists say they’re upset that the president had not only vilified their profession but frozen them out of discussions on key issues. By one light, this is precisely what Obama promised to do in an effort to restore faith in government. By another, it simply enhanced the Congress-K Street power nexus because most of the horse-trading was done on Capitol Hill with White House control.

While the lobbying community is usually covered by the media like a crime beat, most lobbyists are policy experts who often provide input on commissions and other advisory boards. So lobbyists argue that the White House shunning has cost the president valuable advice, political intelligence and institutional backup.

And business leaders, even the few who continue to be Obama-friendly, say they are convinced he is hostile to free markets and the private sector. Some of these executives have balance sheets flush with cash but are reluctant to add jobs or expand in part because they don't trust Obama’s instincts for growth.

“He used anti-corporate, confrontational rhetoric too for legislative gain and kept doing it after folks found it gratuitous,” a top executive said. “During health reform, it was the bad, evil hospitals. . . Same with financial regulation: It was fat cats, greed, corruption.”

Other executives complained that Obama did not do enough outreach, even after the friction became clear. And executives who did get an audience complain that he is too often behind a podium, not doing the off-the-record question-and-answer sessions that would make them feel more involved and maybe promote understanding between the two sides.

“The thing they’re most proud of is that during the campaign, they had a game plan they believed in and they stuck to it, even when everyone told them they were going to lose,” said a well-known Democratic official, summing up a widely held view of the White House. “They didn’t believe what outside people said. So they have this siege mentality, and it’s closed the door.”