Pulping the bully approach to presidential politics, VI

Ezra Klein is replaying that whole paradox of power thing: When Obama comes out for a policy, the GOP will demonize it -- so if Obama wants to get anything done with a GOP House, how can he jump off his shadow?  This time, Klein brings Jon Favreau to bear, affirming the White House's not-at-all-surprising hyper-awareness of this conundrum:

Jonathan Favreau, who in February stepped down as Obama’s chief speechwriter, said that dealing with the Republican Party’s reflexive opposition is a pervasive reality in the White House. “People take a very realistic approach to it,” he said. “They’re not frustrated or upset. It’s more, ‘This is just the way things are and this is how we’ll deal with it.’ The strategy always comes to ‘What gives us the best chance to get something passed?’”

Intransigence got them the win. Intransigence keeps them from taking it.

Brian Beutler has an intricate and well-sourced account of how the Obama administration scopes out the task of creating a "permission structure" for Republicans to compromise on a budgetary grand bargain. Broadly, it's Gang of Six II, a new attempt to jump off the presidential shadow by staying in the shadows, averting what Ezra Klein called the paradox of power: "If you take a strong position, the other side will immediately take the opposite position."

So once again, as Beutler puts it, "Obama’s putative absence is key to creating the political space Senate Republicans need to negotiate in good faith." But the master hurdle is in the House, where the GOP majority is way more recalcitrant than the five-odd GOP senators who would be needed to get a bill through the Senate.  And there, Beutler's framing caught my eye, because it illustrates a second paradox:

The paradox of power, immigration reform edition

It's pretty amusing that Republicans are lambasting Obama for daring to stick his oar into the immigration reform process:

...Republicans quickly condemned the reports of a new administration plan, calling it “dead on arrival” and “very counterproductive”...

On Sunday, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, another Republican calling for immigration changes, said on “This Week” that the president’s efforts to develop his own legislation would undermine efforts on Capitol Hill and were taking “things in the wrong direction.” 

No one is more aware than Obama that he, as president "remains a polarizing figure," as the Times' Michael Shear and Julia Preston put it.  The last time Congress was huffing and puffing in the early stages of a Grand Bargain, almost exactly two years ago (2/15/11), over deficit reduction,  Obama explained why he had not unveiled a detailed plan: