WASHINGTON & SANTA FE, NM (By Carrie Budoff Brown and Jonathan Allen, Politico) January 17, 2012  — Candidate Barack Obama promised to transcend Washington partisanship.

President Obama plummeted into it.

As the House returns Tuesday for the final session of his first term, Obama’s failure to fulfill this central claim of his 2008 campaign has never been more glaringly obvious.

The hard truth is Washington next year will look indistinguishable from the one Obama warned against during his election-night victory speech, when he called on Republicans and Democrats to “resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.”

His relationship with Republican lawmakers is broken, the victim of grand expectations and hardball political tactics, irreconcilable policy differences and perceived personal snubs.

Obama’s early promises to invite lawmakers to the White House for weekly cocktails and congressional leaders for monthly meetings sound oddly quaint. His days of personally courting rank-and-file Republicans for votes are long gone. The broad majorities senior Obama aides once predicted for major legislation never materialized.

The degree of dysfunction may not matter much through November, but it will in a second term if Obama wants to build on a legacy that hasn’t racked up a major legislative achievement since his first two years in office. At that point, Obama may very well find himself with a more Republican Congress than the one he struggles with now.

“I don’t see anything changing,” said Jim Manley, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and senior director at Quinn Gillespie & Associates, a lobbying firm. “Long term for the president, it is going to be very tough going. It is going to be very difficult to operate on Capitol Hill in the next couple of years because the legislative process has all but broken down. And anyone who thinks the elections are going to change everything needs to get their head examined.”

Obama issued divorce papers to Congress this month when, in an unprecedented institutional snub, he unilaterally installed a new consumer watchdog and new appointees to the National Labor Relations Board over the objections of Senate Republicans. Obama already had decided to lash Congress from the campaign trail for the next year, and his aides made clear the president has essentially given up on wringing any major legislation out of the place until after the election.

To his senior aides, the president had no other choice. To Hill Democrats, the breakup was painfully overdue after Republicans spent three years blocking much of what Obama put forward — even when they had supported the proposals in the past, even when he infuriated Democrats in pursuit of their votes — as part of a strategy of near-uniform opposition.

“He’s been frustrated every step of the way and defeated in this goal by the Republicans,” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said of the president’s efforts to bridge the partisan divide.

Republicans counter Obama never tried hard enough to understand Congress or build a relationship with its leaders, not during the first two years when his party controlled both chambers and not beyond the first six months of the 112th Congress with the House in GOP hands.

The tales of perceived insults are legion. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) didn’t get his first one-on-one meeting with Obama until August 2010, almost 20 months into his presidency. A freshman House Republican was told by White House staff he would need to “behave” if he appeared with the president in Michigan. A senior Senate Republican learned on the Sunday talk shows the administration had targeted him as a possible vote for the consumer watchdog head — and didn’t hear directly from the White House for three more days, via email from a legislative liaison.

“We have divided government. You have to work harder,” said Brendan Buck, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). It just means you have to work overtime to get things done.”

Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney has taken up the critique, too, blasting Obama from the campaign trail for failing “to build relationships and trust and respect with Republicans.”

White House aides, who find the notion absurd Obama didn’t do enough Republican outreach, say the president still believes in his 2008 vision, and he still stands ready to work with the GOP on issues they can agree on.

“We are hopeful the Republicans will see the light this year, just like former House Speaker Newt

Gingrich saw the light in 1996,” a senior administration official said, referring to the legislative session when the GOP, suffering politically from the 1995 government shutdown, worked with former President Bill Clinton to overhaul the welfare system.

The White House has a pair of Hill-savvy senior aides whose relationships in the Capitol could, in another era, grease the legislative skids for the president.

Incoming chief of staff Jack Lew is a Hill veteran with a line to leaders in both parties and both chambers. White House Legislative Affairs Director Rob Nabors formed a bond with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s chief of staff, Steve Stombres, over their high school alma mater Robert E. Lee High School in Springfield, Va., and mutual friends.

But nobody expects bipartisanship to break out this year. Maybe not even next year, when the presidential campaign is over and when it should be easier to govern without so much political risk.

Obama acknowledged last month he hadn’t changed the tone in Washington — and he may not be able to.

“It was gonna take more than a year,” Obama told CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “It was gonna take more than two years. It was gonna take more than one term. Probably takes more than one president.”

This wasn’t his line four years ago. He said it wouldn’t be easy, but there was no talk then of a two-term proposition, or longer.

In introducing Joe Biden as his vice presidential nominee in August 2008, Obama said: “After decades of steady work across the aisle, I know he’ll be able to help me turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington, so we can bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda that works for the American people.”

Clinton arrived with a pledge to work across the aisle, only to see his 1993 budget plan pass without any Republican votes, signaling the start of a highly partisan first term. George W. Bush campaigned on the same mantra, but the recount in Florida kept both parties in combat mode long after the election ended.

For Obama, like his predecessors, the promise was impossible to keep without buy-in from the rest of Washington.

The moment of disenchantment in the Obama era varied. For one former senior administration official, it came when Republicans contended the Democratic health care proposal included death panels for seniors. For another former senior administration official, it crystallized the summer of 2010, when Republicans threw up procedural hurdles on a bill to aid small businesses, usually a bipartisan initiative.

But it really was the battle over the 2009 stimulus package that schooled White House aides, who looked naive when they set an 80-vote target in the Senate. Obama struggled to win over three Senate Republicans, and the House GOP stood in uniform opposition.

Obama then spent the rest of 2009 trying to lock in at least one Republican vote in all of Congress for his health care overhaul. It never happened. He fared only slightly better on the Wall Street reform law in mid-2010, winning over three Republicans in the Senate and three in the House.

Days after Republicans won control of the House in November 2010, Obama pledged to return to the bipartisan principles of his 2008 campaign.

“I neglected some things that matter a lot to people, and rightly so: maintaining a bipartisan tone in Washington,” he said. “I’m going to redouble my efforts to go back to some of those first principles.”

And for a time, he did, agreeing to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy — much to the annoyance of Hill Democrats — and hiring Bill Daley as chief of staff, in part because of his ties to Hill Republicans. But after the debt ceiling debacle and the failed efforts to forge a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction, the Obama experiment officially collapsed.

“He shoulders none of the blame,” said Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar with the liberal Brookings Institution. “He didn’t break his promise in terms of trying. He was foolish enough to promise not just effort but outcome. He offered a goal, a vision that was well beyond his control, or power to effect.”

Naturally, Republicans see the past three years differently. They felt run over by the White House and dismissed by a president who they say doesn’t understand the Hill, despite his four years in the Senate. A frequent complaint is Obama did little to build relationships with Boehner and McConnell during the first two years of his presidential term, when he didn’t need them because Democrats controlled both chambers.

Freshman Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) was surprised when White House officials told local reporters he had declined an invitation to attend the president’s summer 2011 event at an iode battery manufacturing plant in Holland, Mich.

An aide to the congressman had contacted the White House to get details, according to Huizenga’s office. About a day and a half before the event, the White House liaison assigned to Huizenga informed his office he would be expected to “behave” if he sought an invite. The president’s aides, according to Huizenga’s office, were upset with the congressman for participating in a freshman Republican rally outside the White House in which they called on Obama to release details of his deficit-reduction plan.

Huizenga never asked for the invitation. It never came. And he wasn’t on stage at the manufacturing plant, depriving both sides of photo-op bipartisanship.

Obama has frayed nerves and relationships by seizing power from a Congress unwilling or unable to stop him: a Libya operation for which he neither sought nor waited for congressional approval, an endless stream of “We Can’t Wait” executive orders and the president’s relentless criticism of Republicans on jobs.

He stunned Republicans with the recess appointments, but they were only the latest aggravation.

“He already doesn’t have a relationship. It is like cheating on the girlfriend you never visit,” said a senior Senate GOP leadership aide. “She is already pissed at you.”