President Obama effectively began the negotiations Monday that he had pledged to avoid, over whether Congress should raise the borrowing limit at the end of next month.
His opening bid: I won’t negotiate.
President Obama held his final news conference of his first term on Monday to press Congress to raise the debt ceiling.
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Obama used the final news conference of his first term to warn a divided Congress to raise the debt ceiling in the coming weeks or risk turning the United States into what he called “a deadbeat nation.”
Invoking his recent election victory as proof that the American people support his broader approach to taxes and spending, Obama said that, in return for raising the borrowing limit, House Republicans would receive precisely nothing.
“They will not collect a ransom for not crashing the American economy,” Obama said in his opening statement from the East Room of the White House.
The president’s attempt to make raising the borrowing limit entirely a matter for an unpopular Congress to address marks a shift from the central role he played in 2011, when he was drawn into a summer-long debate over the issue that badly damaged his political standing on the eve of an election year.
Congress eventually raised the borrowing limit, but for the first time, a credit agency downgraded U.S. debt partly because of the political uncertainty those negotiations created.
This time Obama is trying to stay out of the discussion, even as he called a Monday news conference to highlight the dangers of failing to raise the debt ceiling and what he believes is Congress’s responsibility for avoiding them.
The balance Obama is trying to strike — involvement without seeming to be involved — shows how difficult it will be for the president to ignore an issue that could have such a potentially calamitous effect on the U.S. economy, which he said Monday is “poised for a good year.”
“As long as Washington politics don’t get in the way of America’s progress,” he added.
White House officials know privately that Obama will be asked to participate in the debt-ceiling talks, and they believe that the president’s victory in forcing House Republicans to raise some taxes in the fiscal cliff deal will help them exert behind-the-scenes influence over this round
Polls showed that Obama, who secured higher tax rates for the wealthy in those “fiscal cliff” negotiations, emerged in a better position from them than did House Republicans.
As one senior administration official, who requested anonymity to describe how the White House is thinking about the coming weeks, said, “We are stronger for the debt fight because we won the fiscal cliff fight.”
“That’s how we’re going to look at this,” the official said.
Obama indicated as much Monday with a strong defense of his spending priorities, a relatively liberal mix of safety-net protection and money for education, scientific research and other areas he believes will help modernize the American economy.
He said the ideological contest over his and the Republican Party’s visions of government’s role is at the heart of the debt-ceiling debate, rather than a good-faith discussion over ways to reduce the deficit. The larger debate, he has argued, should be separate from the borrowing limit talks.
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