ANALYSIS/OPINION: 
 
 ANALYSIS/OPINION: 
 
 “I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away. It’s called the American Jobs Act. There should be nothing controversial about this piece of legislation. Everything in here is the kind of proposal that’s been supported by both Democrats and Republicans — including many who sit here tonight. And everything in this bill will be paid for. Everything. (Applause.)” 
 
 That’s what President Obama told lawmakers Sept. 8 in a hastily called joint session of Congress. But it was — and is — a flat-out lie, and Mr. Obama knows it. 
 
 He has since then traveled the country to pitch the plan, exclusively to partisan Democratic crowds that whoop and cheer at the brilliance of it all. He even got wealthy donors to chant “pass this bill!” even though it substantially raises taxes. 
 
 Now, however, we are beginning to see the truth behind the fiction. Not only is the president’s job bill not “the kind of proposal that’s been supported by both Democrats and Republicans,” it’s not even the kind of proposal that Democrats can currently support. 
 
 On Monday, senators passed a bill to keep the government open into the next fiscal year and then headed out on vacation for the rest of the week. Majority Leader Harry Reid said when they return they’ll get back to work — not on the jobs bill, but on a measure to punish China over its currency valuation. Mr. Reid said that bill is a bigger priority right now. 
 
 There’s a story making the rounds in Washington that explains Mr. Reid’s dyspeptic countenance. On a secret meeting at the White House after the debt-ceiling deal collapsed (mainly because Mr. Obama doubled the amount of taxes he wanted), the president sat with the top Republican and Democrat from both the House and Senate. They offered a deal, one that all four agreed on and that all four vowed could get through the two chambers. 
 
 Mr. Obama nixed it. In one version of the story, a peeved Mr. Reid said, “I’m not going to do anything for that [expletive] again.” 
 
 By the end of the week, Democrats were in open revolt. Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, asked whether his party had the votes to pass the president’s bill, said flatly: “Not at the moment, I don’t think we do, but, uh, we can work on it.” He added: “We’re not going to have 100 percent of Democratic senators [support the bill], that’s why it needs to be bipartisan.” 
 
 The reason is simple: Democrats in the House and Senate stand for re-election in just 13 months, and their campaigns will be difficult enough without raising taxes just before voters go to the polls. Said a blunt Mr. Durbin: “There are some senators who are up for election who say ‘I’m never gonna vote for a tax increase while I’m up for election, even on the wealthiest people.’” 
 
 Makes sense. It’s a hard sell for lawmakers if they pass the bill, which would raise taxes by $467 billion on wealthier Americans and corporations. 
 
 And Mr. Obama knew that when he delivered his big speech last month. His strategy is clear (if simple-minded): blame Congress for the mess America’s in. But in so doing, he has caught up his fellow Democrats who, pressed to the wall, are fully prepared to bail on him and save their own skins. They want no part of the amateurish strategy to try to blame Congress, half-controlled by Democrats. 
 
 In fact, even some of the most rabidly liberal Democrats are planning to abandon the president because they see he’s only interested in saving his job, not theirs. More, Mr. Obama is throwing his former Senate colleagues under the bus as he scrambles to win another term. 
 
 So, this jobs bill is dead. And no matter how many times Mr. Obama repeats the lie that his “is the kind of proposal that’s been supported by both Democrats and Republicans,” it will be House Republicans who write a bill that can actually pass the Senate. 
 
 • Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at [email protected] 
 
 
 
 
 
 Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. ||||| The president’s friends (and foes) on what prompted his lurch to the left—and whether it will work. Plus, Michael Tomasky on Obama's new centrist battle plan . 
 
 Editor's Note: An earlier version of the story included a comment erroneously attributed to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, criticizing the White House’s efforts at political messaging. Newsweek and The Daily Beast regret the error. 
 
 
 
 The populist reincarnation of President Obama since Labor Day—with his stinging attacks on tax-coddled millionaires, corporate-jet owners, and oil companies—emerged from a moment of reflection during a summer of discontent. 
 
 For months after the Democrats’ “shellacking” last November, Obama resisted bashing corporate America and the GOP as he had done so effectively as the “hope and change” orator in 2008 and as a young president who pushed through Congress an $800 billion stimulus, a universal-health-care law, and sweeping Wall Street reform. 
 
 But by the end of June, with the nation teetering near the brink of default and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor walking away from negotiations over a debt deal, the president summoned his top aides for a frank assessment of how to get back on track. 
 
 Senior adviser David Plouffe told Obama it was time to “draw some lines in the sand” by launching an aggressive assault on tax breaks for corporate high fliers and hedge-fund managers. 
 
 The president was energized, saying such loopholes were “indefensible” while spending was being slashed and that “this is a public argument we can and should win.” He tested the message with reporters soon afterward. 
 
 President Obama holds his American Jobs Act as he speaks in Denver on September 27, 2011. (Mandel Ngan / AFP-Getty Images) 
 
 Thus began a full-throated return to Obama’s populism, which had been muffled by frustrating attempts at bipartisanship and a stop-and-start effort with Republicans and the business community that one adviser says had become a “road wreck.” 
 
 At a meeting with his staff to draw up a new jobs bill, Obama warned against playing small ball. “I do not want the first filter to be whether it can get the support of House Republicans,” he told his staff. 
 
 Obama’s revised strategy came into full focus in a fiery speech last month in which he laid out a $450 billion plan clearly aimed at generating middle-class jobs while targeting millionaires and big business for tax hikes. 
 
 That strategy may do little to break the political paralysis gripping Washington or solve the riddle of joblessness, but it has returned the president to a message and style that fits more comfortably than his long, and often awkward, courtship of corporate America and its Republican allies in Congress. 
 
 At first Obama interpreted the midterm election losses as a call from voters to engage the business world and compromise with Republicans. The election results made clear that voters—especially independents—were angry with Obama for failing to deliver the jobs he had promised. The administration responded by looking for new ways to stimulate demand and ease regulatory burdens that business executives claim are keeping them from reinvesting stockpiles of cash and hiring more workers. 
 
 Obama met privately with CEOs at Blair House—across the street from the White House—in December 2010. He was told bluntly but politely that big business wanted fewer regulations, new tax incentives, and the resurrection of long-delayed trade agreements. 
 
 Obama soon trekked across the street again to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to make amends with a pro-business lobby that had been the object of many Democratic attacks. “Maybe we would have gotten off on a better foot if I had brought over a fruitcake when we first moved in,” Obama quipped. 
 
 By February, the president was reaching out to Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs in a private dinner that reaffirmed the disconnect between Obama’s approach and what business titans believed was necessary for a lasting recovery. 
 
 At a white-clothed table in the California dining room of venture capitalist John Doerr, Obama dined with a dozen gurus from Silicon Valley’s hottest companies. Flanked by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on his right and Apple’s Steve Jobs on his left, Obama was among friendly faces—Oracle’s Larry Ellison across from him, along with the chieftains of Google, Yahoo, Netflix, and Cisco—eager to offer advice on solving the maddening riddle of joblessness and economic decline. 
 
 The guests urged Obama to offer major companies that have kept overseas profits offshore a one-time tax holiday to repatriate their earnings and pay a rate well below the normal 35 percent corporate tax. The payoff, the executives argued, would come in reinvestment in capital projects, R&D, and new hiring, as well as new distributions to stockholders and investors—essentially a stimulus of private money that also would fill the U.S. Treasury with elusive tax dollars. (The firms represented in the room held more than $100 billion offshore, with Apple alone sitting on $47.6 billion.) 
 
 The president politely listened, then edged toward an objection. 
 
 “He starts to say, ‘Here are a few of the concerns I’ve heard. It didn’t create many jobs last time,’?” says one person familiar with the event, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because the event was closed to the press. (Congress and the Bush administration tried a similar tax incentive in 2005.) “It wasn’t a hard sell and it wasn’t a pushback. It was a gentle discussion of each side’s talking points.” 
 
 The tone was far different from Obama’s more bombastic approach toward business in 2009. “The one time I saw him visibly angry, it was over the bank bonuses during all the bailouts,” says former White House economist Jared Bernstein. “It really rankled him.” 
 
 Bringing on former JPMorgan Chase executive Bill Daley as chief of staff last January didn’t hurt his relations with business. But one challenge remained: Obama’s Chicago confidant Valerie Jarrett had been acting as a liaison to the business community from the beginning—with few positive results. “She tells us whatever she thinks you want to hear and then there is no follow-up,” claims one business executive with frequent contact with Jarrett. “There is lots of happy talk ... but then nothing comes of it.” 
 
 AOL founder Steve Case counters that Jarrett has been “very responsive” to executives, often emailing back within minutes, but concedes progress has been slow. “The first two years the business community felt the White House team didn’t really engage in business and not enough people on the team had the kind of experience we really needed. We thought they were tone deaf,” he says. 
 
 Even some of Obama’s staunchest supporters acknowledge a perceived gap between promise and performance. They see a president who underestimated the challenge of the economic recovery and whose background as a law professor lacking real-life business experience left him unprepared to improvise on policy in a productive way. 
 
 Jason Reed, Reuters / Landov 
 
 Also in Newsweek The Search for Bold Leadership 
 
 It fell to top environmental adviser Carol Browner, for instance, to tell the president-elect early on why he couldn’t spend much more than $3 billion building a high-tech electrical grid. Browner knew all the obstacles, that local laws would have to be circumvented and permits obtained. You can’t just build power wires where you want, she explained to a frustrated Obama. 
 
 Andy Stern, who as the longtime head of the powerful SEIU union in 2008 relentlessly fought for Obama’s candidacy, sees a president who until recently tried to solve economic problems with abstract ideas rather than pragmatic solutions. 
 
 “The administration has suffered from the large macroeconomic theories of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner that look more at formula and financing than day-to-day job creation,” says Stern, an advocate of the repatriation holiday. “They thought they had done what they needed to do, and they were wrong.” 
 
 Democrats in Congress add to the indictment, charging that the president failed to sell his successes more aggressively, letting the opposition define them. 
 
 
 
 In response to such criticism, former White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee says the president is contending with adversaries who are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure his failure. “Some of his opponents didn’t seem to care whether what they were advocating seemed to do grievous harm to the economy if they could get some political win out of it,” Goolsbee says. 
 
 Other defenders note that Obama inherited a financial disaster after the Wall Street meltdown. “A lot of things were done right, and we avoided an economic calamity,” says Peter Orszag, Obama’s former budget director. “One of the mistakes was to put much too little weight on the hard slog that typically follows financial slumps.” 
 
 But officials concede the administration’s frequent mantra—things could’ve been worse—isn’t exactly bumper-sticker material. “When people see really dark clouds, no matter how good a line in a speech is, you’re not going to convince them the sky is blue,” Plouffe says. 
 
 Press Secretary Jay Carney also downplays the importance of spin, saying that the president wields “the biggest megaphone there is in politics, but it doesn’t have the reach it once had” in a media world flooded with information and quickly consumed by the next crisis. 
 
 White House officials insist Obama’s agenda hasn’t changed. But he is done playing nice with the Republicans as he rallies the troops for 2012. Plouffe contends the corporate community backs Obama on some issues, and “there are a lot of business leaders who are Republicans who don’t identify with this brand of Tea Party Republicanism.” 
 
 Campaign adviser David Axelrod says Republicans have done “diabolically well” at creating “a dysfunctional political system” and blaming it on Obama. Still, the return to a harder line against big business and the wealthy could have repercussions as Democrats try to raise the money they need to win next year. 
 
 Washington sports-team owner Ted Leonsis, an Obama donor in 2008, says he now cringes at the latest “class warfare” language: “Someone needs to talk our president down off of this rhetoric about good vs. evil,” he says. 
 
 The larger question is whether the fired-up president can persuade a country that is losing patience with him and ease the only number that may matter on Election Day: 14 million unemployed.
– Is President Obama facing a revolt from his Democratic generals? Nancy Pelosi certainly doesn’t seem happy. She offered a surprisingly blunt critique of the president and his team recently, buried within this Howard Kurtz Newsweek piece on Obama’s newfound populist punch. “I think you need to talk about how poorly they do on message,” Pelosi grouses. “They can’t see around corners; they anticipate nothing." Rumor has it that Harry Reid isn’t happy, either. Take this one with a grain of salt, but conservative Washington Times columnist Joseph Curl writes today that there’s a “story making the rounds in Washington” that Reid and Obama have been on the outs ever since Obama, in a secret meeting, nixed a debt ceiling deal that both the House and Senate thought could pass. “I’m not going to do anything for that [expletive] again,” Reid is rumored to have declared afterward. Curl does not cite any sources.