The President seems to be coming to the understanding that you can't win a baseball game when the other team is playing football. Or that you can't win a knife fight when you show up armed only with a 14 point agenda for negotiation based on mutual concessions made by both sides and a sincere desire for both sides to act with maturity and common sense.
Call it lessons learned the hard way, or the necessary readjustment by a politician, but the Obama who spoke on Monday was in a far different place politically and stylistically from the president who tried to pull off a grand bargain with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in July and August.
Obama is a politician whose first instincts always have been to try to find ways to entice, cajole, reason with or otherwise produce cross-party consensus. On Monday, he continued a transition toward greater partisanship that began with his speech to a joint session of Congress two weeks ago.
Rarely has this president been as blunt in his challenges to the other party as he was on Monday. Rarely has he been so willing to draw lines in the sand. Rarely has he waved the threat of a veto with such emphasis.
Obama has gone from a president who talked openly about his willingness to rile his own party by making concessions on entitlements to get a deal with the Republicans to a politician determined to reconnect with his base as the two parties head into a new round of negotiations and an election campaign in which the stakes could not be higher."
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