Obama reaches out to congressional Republicans

WASHINGTON (AP) — Enveloped by polit­i­cal grid­lock, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama is reach­ing out to rank-and-file Repub­li­cans, meet­ing for din­ner with GOP sen­a­tors Wednes­day night and then vis­it­ing Capi­tol Hill next week for sep­a­rate meet­ings with Sen­ate and House Republicans.

The law­mak­ers sched­uled to attend Wednesday’s din­ner are Sens. John McCain, Lind­sey Gra­ham, Kelly Ayotte, Pat Toomey, Bob Corker, Ron John­son, Saxby Cham­b­liss, Tom Coburn, John Hoeven, Dan Coats, Richard Burr and Mike Johanns.

Obama raised the idea of a din­ner dur­ing a phone con­ver­sa­tion with Gra­ham ear­lier this week and asked the South Car­olina sen­a­tor to put together the guest list, a White House offi­cial said.

Obama and the law­mak­ers planned to meet on neu­tral ter­ri­tory, with din­ner sched­uled for 6:30 p.m. at a hotel near the White House. With a snow storm bar­rel­ing down on the Wash­ing­ton region, the White House said the din­ner could be post­poned if the weather dete­ri­o­rated through­out the day.

The din­ner will be fol­lowed up by a rare trip by Obama to Capi­tol Hill. He’ll meet there with Sen­ate Repub­li­cans next Thurs­day and hold a sep­a­rate meet­ing with House Repub­li­cans, although a date for that meet­ing is yet to be sched­uled. The pres­i­dent will also meet next week with Sen­ate and House Democrats.

Obama’s Repub­li­can out­reach fol­lows Washington’s fail­ure to reach a deal to avert the $85 bil­lion in auto­matic bud­get cuts that started going into effect Fri­day. The new GOP charm offen­sive also under­scores the lim­i­ta­tions of the president’s pre­vi­ous strat­egy, which cen­tered on using pub­lic pres­sure to win Repub­li­can coop­er­a­tion, not nego­ti­a­tions with lawmakers.

Sen­ate Minor­ity Leader Mitch McConnell said the pres­i­dent requested the meet­ing through his chief of staff. McConnell’s office said the pres­i­dent last attended the Sen­ate GOP’s pol­icy lunch in May 2010.

“We have numer­ous chal­lenges fac­ing the coun­try and Repub­li­cans have offered the pres­i­dent seri­ous solu­tions to shrink Wash­ing­ton spend­ing and grow the econ­omy,” McConnell said in a state­ment. “And we will have an oppor­tu­nity to dis­cuss them with the pres­i­dent at the lunch.”

House Speaker John Boehner’s office said Wednes­day that the pres­i­dent had also requested the meet­ing next week with House Repub­li­cans. The White House and Boehner’s office were work­ing to sched­ule that meet­ing, the speaker’s office said.

McConnell, Boehner and other mem­bers of GOP lead­er­ship are tellingly being left out of the din­ner Obama will host Wednes­day. They also didn’t make the list of Repub­li­can law­mak­ers Obama started call­ing over the week­end. Sev­eral of the sen­a­tors attend­ing the din­ner also received calls from the president.

“This is how you solve hard prob­lems,” Gra­ham said of Obama’s out­reach. “We’re talk­ing about fol­low­ing up on that, how we can get more peo­ple in the mix, so what I see from the pres­i­dent is incred­i­bly encouraging.”

White House aides say the president’s calls with Repub­li­cans focus in part on jump­start­ing broader bud­get talks, but also on Obama’s pro­pos­als for over­haul­ing the nation’s immi­gra­tion laws and enact­ing stricter gun con­trol measures.

“He is reach­ing out and talk­ing to mem­bers about a vari­ety of issues — not just our fis­cal chal­lenges, but cer­tainly the fis­cal issues are among the issues he is talk­ing about with law­mak­ers,” White House spokesman Jay Car­ney said.

Posted by Matt Echelberry on Mar 6 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.