Sharing the bully pulpit

WASHINGTON -- Ever since Theodore Roosevelt a century ago declared the White House "a bully pulpit," presidents have mounted its rostrum as an exclusive forum for selling their ideas to the American public.

The very name "bully pulpit" connotes giving the opposition hell, as TR did in going to the American public as a trustbuster castigating "malefactors of great wealth." But the old Rough Rider often used the word "bully" as a synonym for "wonderful" rather than as "intimidating." His exact quote about speaking out from the White House was: "I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit."

Later presidents like Harry Truman pointedly employed the White House bully pulpit to "give 'em hell," particularly Republicans in "the Do-Nothing Congress," using them as whipping boys in upsetting Thomas Dewey in 1948.

The other night, President Barack Obama turned to the bully pulpit again, getting the television networks to give him night prime time to make his case for raising the federal debt limit. To get around the intransigence of House Republicans on no new taxes, he handed Speaker John Boehner some credit for trying to corral his wayward tea party partners. But in doing so he cast Boehner as an ineffective leader of his own troops.

The speaker, meanwhile, successfully pressured the networks for prime television time on Obama's heels. He effectively kidnapped the bully pulpit to Capitol Hill, denouncing the president as backing off a supposed deal that would have allowed raising the debt limit and lifting the threat of a government default.

Boehner's Senate counterpart, Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, had already led the way by introducing his plan essentially to let Obama raise the limit on a short-term basis on his own responsibility, in return for promised future spending cuts. Boehner then went McConnell one better, walking out of talks with Obama and summoning the two Democratic congressional leaders, Harry Reid in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi in the House, to his Capitol Hill office.

Nothing productive came from that session, but it did emphasize Boehner's power and his intention to end-run Obama, a move in which Reid and Pelosi somewhat surprisingly acquiesced. The caper may well have explained Obama's angry tone thereafter "commanding" that they all reconvene in his office the next morning, which also was unproductive except in raising temperatures.

But as a wielder of the bully pulpit, Barack Obama is no Teddy Roosevelt. He did rightly note that the current problems go back to the way his Republican predecessor turned the Bill Clinton surplus of 2000 into deficits with his deep tax cuts rather than paying off some of the debt. But Obama's use of that argument in 2010 did not prevent Republican takeover of the House.

Instead, the president was hardly a bully the other night in saying "neither party is blameless for the decisions that led to this problem." It was another toothless plea that both parties now have a responsibility to solve it, an appeal for comity and compromise that has long since come up empty.

Boehner for his part could not resist saying for the cameras that all the country got for "that significant binge" in Obama's first two years was a health-care bill that "Americans never asked for," and a stimulus bill "that was more effective in providing material for late-night comedians that it was in providing jobs."

The speaker again expressed his contempt for compromise, saying, "Obama wanted a blank check six months ago" for more spending "and he wants a blank check today. That is not going to happen." And he insisted "there is no stalemate in Congress" because the House has passed an all-cuts, no-taxes bill and a call for a balance budget amendment. But that idea is considered dead on arrival in the Senate.

Boehner's gambit in making his Capitol Hill a bully pulpit was a deft effort to shift both the battleground and the megaphone in the debt-limit argument from the White House to Congress, where his own more limited power resides. Whether he can also shift the blame for the whole fiasco is the question now.

Columnist Jules Witcover's latest book is "Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption." You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.