Obama, Down but Not Out, Presses Ahead

By PETER BAKER and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

President Obama emerged from last week’s midterm election rejected by voters, hobbled politically and doomed to a final two years in office suffering from early lame-duck syndrome. That, at least, was the consensus in both parties. No one seems to have told Mr. Obama.

In the 10 days since “we got beat,” as he put it, by Republicans who captured the Senate and bolstered control over the House, Mr. Obama has flexed his muscles on immigration, climate change and the Internet, demonstrating that he still aspires to enact sweeping policies that could help define his legacy.

The timing of the three different decisions was to some extent a function of separate policy clocks, not simply a White House political strategy. Mr. Obama, for example, had been scheduled to travel to China for a summit meeting in mid-November, and American officials have been trying for most of the year to negotiate a climate agreement for him to announce while in Beijing.

Still, even if by happenstance, the back-to-back moves have reinforced Mr. Obama’s desire to assert himself in a period when his poll numbers and political capital are at their lowest ebbs. While losing Congress was a grievous blow that will further challenge his capacity to govern, advisers said that he feels liberated. He can now pursue his long-term agenda, they said, without being tethered to the short-term electoral concerns of his party’s leadership in Congress.

In the process, though, Mr. Obama has angered Republicans who accuse him of essentially defying the message sent by the electorate. All of the talk by the White House in recent days of working together with the new Congress seems belied by a president who has wasted little time advancing some of the same policies that were renounced just a week ago, Republicans said.

“The president is completely ignoring the will of the American voters, who turned out on Election Day and overwhelmingly elected people who wanted to change the direction of the country,” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, said in an interview. “Even today, the new polls show Americans would rather have Republicans make the agenda changes than the president.”

But aides said Mr. Obama has concluded that he cannot let opposition from the other party stop him from advancing his priorities, and in his postelection comments, Mr. Obama predicted he would take actions that Republicans would not like. While White House advisers interpreted the election results as a mandate to work across the aisle, they said that cannot simply be a prescription for more gridlock where the president does nothing without Republican approval.

“Our bottom line is we think people want results,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the White House communications director. “They want things to improve. They want you to take action. They’re more focused on outcomes than process.”

Although they do not present it this way, in some ways Mr. Obama and his aides are taking a page from President George W. Bush’s playbook after his own “thumping” in his final midterm elections. Instead of pulling out of the deteriorating war in Iraq, as Democrats interpreted Mr. Bush’s election mandate, he sent more troops. Democrats like Mr. Obama, then a senator, accused the president of defying the voters. In the end, the reinforcements and a strategy change helped turn around the war.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama will continue to have a relatively free hand on foreign policy, although he has asked Congress to fashion a new authorization for his own air war in Iraq and next-door Syria against the Islamic State militant group. But it remains less clear how far he can go toward other goals without Congress.

His agreement with China to reduce carbon emissions over the next decade is not binding and ultimately will depend on his successor enacting policies to achieve those goals. Likewise, his planned immigration executive order providing work permits to millions of people in the country illegally will remain in force only as long as he is in office.

Still, aides said Mr. Obama seems energized by the postelection actions. As early as the day after the voting, senior officials described him as impatient to reclaim the presidential megaphone and argue for policy initiatives after a year of hanging back in deference to Democratic operatives worried about the backlash for vulnerable candidates.

It is a change in tone that has been apparent to liberal activists who have often criticized Mr. Obama for being too timid and willing to compromise. Public interest groups and technology start-up executives said they saw the new dynamic at work on Monday, when they got a heads-up to watch the White House website for an announcement that would please them.

Mr. Obama’s videotaped call for a free and open Internet “completely upended the debate, and it was the kind of clear, bold statement we had been waiting for, reconnecting to that language you heard in 2008, where he came out in very stark terms in a pro-public interest way,” said Craig Aaron, the president of Free Press, an advocacy group.

While there is still considerable concern among some White House allies that Mr. Obama will allow Republicans to set the terms of debate over trade, taxes and infrastructure spending, many argue that the devastating scale of the election losses may have raised pressure on the president to go big in other areas, if only to prove his relevance and agenda-setting authority.

“The president has seen what happens when he doesn’t step forward and Democrats don’t inspire the public or their base — we win on the issues, but lose at the polls — so we can’t do worse,” said Anna Galland, the executive director of MoveOn.org, the progressive advocacy group. “Let’s try being bold.”

Republicans did not see it as bold so much as defiant and said it may cost Mr. Obama the opportunity to make more progress collaboratively. “I’ve been very disturbed about the way the president has proceeded in the wake of the election,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the incoming Republican majority leader.

“I had maybe naïvely hoped the president would look at the results of the election and decide to come to the political center and do some business with us,” he added. “I still hope he does at some point but the early signs are not good.”