Glenn Thrush is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.

Two senior White House staffers stumbled out of the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago into the boozy, early-morning aftermath of President Obama’s Nov. 6, 2012, reelection victory and ran smack into a sober reporter. “It’s over,” one of the wobbly, relieved aides said. “He never has to do this again.”

It’s taken Obama – who spuriously predicted the 2012 election would break the “fever” of partisan gridlock – two miserable years to approach the level of presidential liberation he believes he earned that night. Yet there was always something slightly off about the idea that Obama would do better without a campaign in his future. The truth, according to current and former aides, is that the absence of a presidential election – the natural Obama habitat – actually contributed to the ennui and frustration that has hallmarked most of his second term.


Obama’s turnaround in recent weeks – he’s seized the offensive with a series of controversial executive actions and challenges to leaders in his own party on the budget — can be attributed to a fundamental change in his political mindset, according to current and former aides. He’s gone from thinking of himself as a sitting (lame) duck, they tell me, to a president diving headlong into what amounts to a final campaign – this one to preserve his legacy, add policy points to the scoreboard, and – last but definitely not least – to inflict the same kind of punishment on his newly empowered Republican enemies, who delighted in tormenting him when he was on top.

The pivot isn’t necessarily about embracing the Real Barack Obama (that’s always been a pretty elusive persona) or even about aspiring to the Clintonian ideal of a second-term president leveraging executive power into political muscle. It’s not a matter of superficially emulating a campaign, as he’s done fecklessly in the past, by hitting the road for another round of low-impact speeches or Steve Kroft sit-downs. It’s a campaign between Obama’s ears — a competitor rediscovering his love of competition, the refocusing of a sedentary, atrophied presidency through the lens of a dynamic campaign – and winning.

“He needs to run, to compete – or more to the point, he needs someone to run against,” a former top Obama adviser told me.

He’s got that now, in a Republican-controlled Capitol Hill. Obama, a political counterpuncher who often needs a slap in the face to wake up, got a gut-shot in November. The Democrats’ staggering loss in the midterms – like his disastrous performance in the first presidential debate against Mitt Romney in 2012 – seems to have jolted him to the realization that he’ll have to act boldly to preserve what he’d assumed was a settled legacy. (The Supreme Court’s decision to scrutinize the funding mechanism of the Affordable Care Act, in particular, has sent a shudder through the West Wing and provided an unexpected challenge from another hostile branch of government.)

While it might seem crazy to compare a wiser and wizened president entering his seventh year in office to the callow, Next Big Thing of his U.S. Senate days, Obama is now inhabiting the psychological head-space of his early career on the national political scene. Now as then, he can legitimately describe himself as an underdog. He feels at liberty to address any topic he chooses on his own terms — race, for instance — and, most importantly, he’s increasingly untethered from what he views as a petty, geriatric Democratic establishment he originally crusaded against as a presidential candidate in 2007.

Obama is sure to strike the usual let’s-work-together tone at Friday’s press conference, but it’s clear to anyone who follows him closely that the president is trying to escape from the Washington sausage works and define his own agenda.

“'Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose' — Barack and Bobby McGee,” says former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry. “President Obama is free to take the risks and use executive authority that will either make him a much more popular president with rising approval rates or get him impeached by a Republican Congress that won’t be able to control itself. We can contemplate the possibility of each result while smoking a Cuban cigar.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says Obama’s newly aggressive stance – exemplified by his unilateral moves on immigration and Cuba – poses an early challenge to new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and to House Speaker John Boehner, who are trying to re-shape the GOP into a party that can actually run a government. “Mitch and Boehner have to deal with the fact that Obama is becoming bolder and more radical,” Gingrich told me a few days before Obama announced his move to normalize relations with Cuba.

Extremism is in the eye of the beholder, and Obama says he’s just taking action to deal with fundamental problems that a gridlocked, hopelessly partisan Congress won’t address. His executive action on immigration and his Cuba move this week represent only the highest-profile unilateral steps he’s taken this year. Under the direction of White House Counselor John Podesta, a former Clinton chief of staff who has spurred the president to use executive power, Obama has issued dozens of orders and lower-profile memoranda redefining U.S. policies on emissions and wilderness area protections, created a new class of retirement accounts for low-income workers, capped student loan payments and toughened some firearms background checks.

But to push this agenda – to create a campaign to sell it – Obama needs a campaign team, and that he doesn’t have at the moment. In the past year, he’s spoken only intermittently with the advisers who helped propel him to the Oval Office – especially David Axelrod and David Plouffe. “The sense,” says one member of the Obama campaign alumni association, “is that POTUS feels like he’s figured out this campaign thing and doesn’t need the political guys.”

Stu Stevens, a top adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, says that’s a mistake: “There’s been a real brain drain. Obama was always surrounded by a certain campaign group. … Those were his best political advisers and they are not involved and that is detrimental to him. They understood him and they were good. They were the ones who kept him in line when he was hit by sudden bouts of conscience or went off on one of his social-justice tangents worthy of a 1980s Occidental College student.”

Yet Obama’s current objectives are anything but vague – thanks, in large measure, to Podesta – a human policy machine who’s planning an exit in early 2015. Obama’s bucket list, White House officials say, includes new incremental proposals – legislative or executive – on climate change and immigration. A major piece of unfinished business that vexes Obama is the continued operation of the Guanatanamo Bay detention center, and he’s likely to pursue its piecemeal breakup. Earlier this month his staff convinced the government of Uraguay to take six Gitmo prisoners, and he’s likely to seek more deals along those lines. In addition, people familiar with the West Wing’s plans say Obama is looking at the possibility of instructing the Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service to tighten campaign finance laws and regulations, although they are uncertain how far they can go without running afoul of the courts.

But the truth of the matter is that Obama’s very good 2014 could turn into a check-mated 2015. The House isn’t likely to pass anything significant – or veto-proof – on immigration, but Republicans can, and likely will, block his Cuba policy by upholding the embargo and refusing to fund line items like the cost of building and staffing an embassy in Havana. “Congress is going to be a very different place than it was during the last few weeks if this year — there are still a lot of things that are on the president’s list that has go through Congress,” says former Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. “The question for the White House is not ‘What?’ it’s ‘How?’ … There’s two lists: The list of things you have to convince others to do and the list of things you can do without other people. They are going through the last list first.”

That’s where the campaign mindset will serve him well. The hallmark of Obama’s two presidential campaigns – especially in 2008 – was a rigorous internal discipline that often gave him the element of surprise in launching new policy initiatives, attacks or bold pronouncements (His 2008 Philadelphia race speech, delivered in the middle of the primary fight, was a classic, unexpected, Obamaian bold stroke). At the moment, he seems to have regained a touch of the old audacity and stealth: The Cuba decision, unlike the immigration order, wasn’t leaked and hit like a political lightning bolt, scrambling the 2016 Republican field and forcing a rare clear position from Hillary Clinton.

For that reason, some Democrats I spoke to – including a few in Obama’s camp – cheekily suggested they hoped House Speaker John Boehner would appease the GOP’s tea party wing by disinviting Obama to the State of the Union next month. (Boehner formally invited Obama just before Friday’s press conference.)

“I wish the thing were about 10 minutes long,” said one Democratic policy expert, only half-jokingly. “That way he can just keep springing these big surprises on Congress.”

Jennifer Epstein contributed to this story.