Below The Beltway

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei have a piece up at The Politico today that makes official something that’s been apparent for a long time now:

President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds.

With a series of private meetings and public taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator; and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News.

Obama aides are using their powerful White House platform, combined with techniques honed in the 2008 campaign, to cast some of the most powerful adversaries as out of the mainstream and their criticism as unworthy of serious discussion.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs has mocked Limbaugh from the White House press room podium. White House aides limited access to the Chamber and made top adviser Valerie Jarrett available to reporters to disparage the group. Everyone from White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to White House Communications Director Anita Dunn has piled on Fox News by contending it’s not a legitimate news operation.

All of the techniques are harnessed to a larger purpose: to marginalize not only the individual person or organization but also some of the most important policy and publicity allies of the national Republican Party.

Dunn said that in August, as the president’s aides planned for the fall, they made “a fundamental decision that we needed to be more aggressive in both protecting our position and in delineating our differences with those who were attacking us.”

“It was a time for us to look at the extraordinary success we’ve had in terms of legislation but also to look at where we needed to be more aggressive in defining what the choices are, and in protecting and pushing forward our agenda,” she said.

The campaign underscores how deeply political the Obama White House is in its daily operations — with a strong focus on redrawing the electoral map and discrediting the personalities and ideas that have powered the conservative movement over the past 20 years.

This determination has manifested itself in small ways: This president has done three times as many fundraisers as President George W. Bush had at this point in his term. And in large ones: Beginning with their contretemps with Limbaugh last winter, Obama’s most important advisers miss few opportunities for public and highly partisan shots at his most influential critics.

Now, this is neither surprising nor necessarily wrong.

Anyone who paid even a modest amount of attention to the 2008 campaign realized pretty quickly that the Obama Campaign was unlike any other in it the way that it responded to and took on critics — whether those critics were other candidates or members of the media. The fact that they’re doing it now is just an extension of the campaign.

As for right and wrong, until it got to the point where the Administration was essentially attacking the legitimacy of an entire news organization merely because it doesn’t like it’s ideological tenor, there wasn’t anything wrong with it, either.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s not without risk:

The White House approach could backfire if Obama looks too political or petty, some Democrats say privately. The skeptical reaction to the attacks on Fox News shows this is a possibility: Key commentators have argued that it is foolish of the White House to spend so much time slamming one network simply because it dislikes much of its programming.

An experienced Democratic strategist who likes Obama said his team was having a tough time striking the right balance between short-term skirmishing and the president’s long-term image. “The key to their success — short term and long term — is his personal likability and approval rating,” said the strategist, who requested anonymity in order to speak bluntly. “They’ve taken their eye off that ball a little bit.”

Charlie Black, a Republican lobbyist who was senior political adviser to last year’s presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said the White House salvos are “a far cry from the post-partisan, consensus-driven, unifying approach” that was Obama’s signature during the campaign.

“Fighting with a bunch of different institutions turns him into a typical politician and makes people cynical that anyone’s really going to change Washington,” Black said. “A big part of his ‘hope and change’ message was: ‘We’re gong to talk to everyone.’ He might have had great intentions, but human nature and politics don’t change much.”

Which is why anyone with a modicum of sense should have known from the start that Obama’s promises about being a “different kind” of politician and changing the way Washington works weren’t much more than a bunch of hot air. Washington is a company town, it’s business is politics and it’s been in operation for more than 200 years now — the idea that one relatively inexperienced politician could really change things if anyone put up serious resistance is absurd. And, the hollowness of the promises themselves became apparent when Obama appointed to his inner circle a bunch of people who had spent their careers in Washington and who were part of the culture he was claiming to be coming to change.

Moreover, it’s not even clear that Obama needs to do anything to marginalize Republicans as they seem to be doing a pretty good job of that all on their own.

So, it’s unclear whether this will work or whether it’s even necessary, but the one thing that is clear is that it puts the lie to Obama’s claim to be President of all Americans.

Here’s a video of Allen and VandeHei talking about this article and the follow-up that will appear tomorrow: