From offense to defense

The most sought-after secret document in Washington these days isn't about intelligence operations or the war in Afghanistan. It's the strategic blueprint the new White House chief of staff, Pete Rouse, is drawing up as a starting point for President Obama's next two years.

No, I don't have a copy. White House officials say the paper isn't finished yet, and its fine points will depend on whether Republicans take control of the House and Senate in next month's elections. But Obama and his aides have already begun adjusting to the prospect of living for the next two years without a Democratic majority.

They assume they'll be playing defense, not offense, battling Republicans over tax cuts and spending cuts and fending off GOP efforts to dismantle the healthcare and financial regulation laws Congress passed this year.

"We will fight to keep the reforms we've made," Obama told Democrats in a stump speech last week, but he prudently didn't promise to get much new legislation passed.

"The next phase is going to be less about legislative action than it is about managing the change that we've brought," advisor David Axelrod told my colleagues Peter Nicholas and Christi Parsons.

Obama will continue to call for new laws on energy and immigration, but the chances of big, comprehensive legislation on either issue are slim; instead, the administration will look for opportunities to enact its priorities through piecemeal legislation or administrative fiat.

The main event of postelection politics will be a series of battles over taxes and government spending, as each party strives to keep its promises and test its strength.

The first clash will come in Congress' lame-duck session after the election, when legislators try to break their stalemate over extending tax cuts for households earning more than $250,000 a year (Republicans for, Democrats divided, Obama against).

Even bigger will be a series of battles over appropriations — the laws that set each government agency's spending level for the year. Congress hasn't passed any appropriations bills yet, even though the fiscal year started on Oct. 1. This is where Republicans will get their chance to propose specific spending cuts, and to begin defunding parts of Obama's healthcare law in an attempt to undermine its implementation. (GOP leaders have promised to try to repeal the healthcare law, but Obama would veto any such bill, so that isn't a practical possibility.)

Some White House aides hope to engineer a replay of 1995, the year after President Clinton's Democrats lost the House in a similar Republican wave. In 1995, the new House speaker, Newt Gingrich, demanded deep cuts in federal spending, including future Medicare outlays. In an impasse that led to two federal government shutdowns, Clinton cast himself as a centrist in search of compromise, and won the battle for public opinion.

But a repeat of 1995 in 2011 is unlikely. For one thing, the two parties are even more polarized than they were then. In 1995, Senate Republican leader Bob Dole pushed for compromise; next year's Senate could include a robust "tea party" caucus that would resist any such deals.

For another, Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton. Clinton was a centrist Democrat from Arkansas who thrived on bipartisan deal-making; Obama is a liberal Democrat from Chicago who talks about bipartisanship but hasn't managed to put it into practice (in large part, to be sure, because Republicans chose not to play).

One more difference from 1995 is that House Republican leader John A. Boehner is not Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was an insurgent leader with an impulsive streak; Boehner and his second-in-command, Eric Cantor, are both thoroughly conservative but less impetuous.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Cantor said he has no interest in replaying the Gingrich experience. "I don't think the country needs or wants a [government] shutdown," he said. Republicans want to enact big change, he added, but "[we] have to be careful about how we do it. We don't want to be seen as a bunch of yahoos."

Repositioning himself in the center may be a bigger stretch for Obama than it was for Clinton, but don't count him out. The polarization of the two congressional parties, paradoxically, gives him an opportunity: It leaves the presidency as the only institution that can make things work.

Obama's appointment of Rouse as his chief of staff — so far, only on an interim basis — could be a sign that he's going to try harder to make deals. Rouse's predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, was a rugged partisan whose job was mainly to keep a large but fractious Democratic majority together. Rouse, in contrast, made his name as a quiet deal-maker for Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle in another era when Republicans held the majority.

Both parties will be pulled in two directions, between their vocal extremes and the hard-to-find bipartisan center. But at least one lesson of 1995 still holds true: The party that seizes the center will win.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com