President Obama reached into the old prop bag Monday, waving around a printed copy of his American Jobs Act fastened together with a fat black binder clip. “This is the bill that Congress needs to pass,” he said, holding the stack of paper aloft for the cameras. “No games. No politics. No noise.” Just good photos.
The document was not the only visual aide Obama brought along with him to the Rose Garden. Behind him, there were dozens of firefighters, teachers, construction workers and others, several of them in uniform, the sort of people who would directly benefit from the spending provisions in the Jobs Act. At another time, this sort of Presidential set piece would be routine. But consider the visuals Obama provided during the disastrous summer showdown over the debt ceiling: A President alone in the East Room, a president talking alone in the briefing room, a president sitting in various chairs around various tables with Republican officials. Not exactly the sort of image that conveys a message.
But this is Obama making what his aides hope is a turn. Last Thursday’s preemption of the NFL Season Kickoff Pregame show, was just the set up. The real task that Obama will be judged on is the campaign-style push to get Republicans to either act quickly on his proposals, or suffer a political drubbing. He launched the effort on Friday, when he traveled to the home district of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to push his plan. Now he is keeping the pressure on with visuals that will certainly make the cable net rotations, get excerpted in the nightly news and appear in still photographs in the morning papers.
Obama repeated his call for voters to get involved in the process on Monday, just hours before he is expected to send his new stimulus bill to Congress. “I want you to pick up the phone. I want you to send an email. Use one of those airplane skywriters,” Obama said, to laughter from his worker props. “Dust off the fax machine. Or you can just, like, write a letter.”
Obama also mentioned a Politico story today, which quoted anonymously a senior Republican House aide expressing concern that passing a job’s bill would hurt the GOP in next year’s election. “I mean, that’s the attitude in this town,” Obama said.
It is also the conventional wisdom around the White House, where Obama’s aides long ago concluded that Republicans in Congress are willing to let the American people suffer if it increases their chances at the polls in 2012. Officially, House Republicans deny this, and have been taking pains in recent days to show they are willing to work with Obama. “Any objective reader would by struck by how thin the story is,” wrote one House Republican leadership aide, who also requested anonymity, in an email to TIME. “It cites one anonymous House aide at the top to support its thesis but has nothing else to back it up. Outside the lone unidentified aide, the only concerns expressed are about policy, not political consequences.”
Obama’s campaign-style will continue for the rest of the week. He will travel to Ohio on Tuesday, to visit a recently-modernized school not far from the district of House Speaker John Boehner. On Wednesday, he will visit a small business in North Carolina to talk about potential impact of the jobs bill on similar enterprises. Next week, he plans to lay out a detailed plan for deficit reduction, which will be include ways of paying for the nearly $450 billion in costs for the jobs bill.
But that will not be the end of it. This new campaign pose is the one Obama plans to assume for weeks to come. That means more props, more targeted visits, and more carefully crafted images to help Obama to win the message war he has spent much of the year losing.
Correction: The original version of this story said Politico quoted an anonymous Republican House leadership aide. The Politico story quoted a senior House Republican aide. The story has been changed.