WASHINGTON — Tempers were fraying inside the White House Cabinet Room as night turned into morning Jan. 15. President Barack Obama had been cloistered all day with House and Senate Democrats, playing “marriage counselor,” one aide said, as he coaxed, cajoled and prodded them to come to terms on a health care overhaul.
As the clock neared 1 a.m., the two sides were at an impasse.
Obama stood up to go.
” ‘See what you guys can figure out,’ ” one participant remembers him saying, adding that the failed effort left the president angry.
Another Democrat who was there, Rep. Henry Waxman of California, said Obama left “frustrated that while he was putting out ways to bridge the problem, we hadn’t reached a conclusion.”
Ever since his days as a young community organizer in Chicago, Obama has held fast to the belief that by listening carefully and appealing to reason, he can bring people together to get results. It’s an approach that in Washington has often come up short.
He is not showing any signs of changing his style. But he is facing perhaps the toughest test yet of his powers of persuasion: winning the votes he needs, in the face of unified Republican opposition and a deteriorating climate for Democrats, to push his health care measure through a skittish Congress.
Obama has not been the sort to bludgeon his party into following his lead or to intimidate reluctant legislators. And while he has often succeeded by relying on Democratic leaders in Congress to do his bidding — the House and Senate, after all, both passed versions of the health legislation last year — it is not clear whether his gentle, consensus-building style will be enough.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing a little more toughness here or there,” said Rep. Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat who contends that if Obama had pushed the Senate harder last year, the bill would have been law by now.
White House officials strongly resist any suggestion that Obama is not tough enough, and they say the days are gone when a president can simply browbeat his own party into submission, especially on an issue as complex as health care.
“If the president weren’t tough, if the president weren’t committed, if the president didn’t believe that this was an imperative for the future of American families, businesses and the sustainability of our budget, this thing would have been dead six months ago,” David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said in an interview.
“I would love to live in a world where the president could snap his fingers or even twist arms and make change happen, but in this great democracy of ours, that’s not the way it is,” Axelrod said.
