THE GUARDIAN: President jokes that 'rumours of my demise have been exaggerated' – but failure to pass gun control reforms and a stalemate on the budget have left him increasingly powerless
Perhaps it was the taunting tweet from Mitch McConnell that did it. Or more likely just the indignity of being asked inside his own West Wing whether he was "losing his juice". But just 100 days into his new term, Barack Obama has been forced to confront the issue that is on everyone's lips in Washington right now: is his second presidency over before it ever really began?
"As Mark Twain said, rumours of my demise might be exaggerated at this point," insisted Obama during his first White House press conference in two months. He was responding to a question from ABC's Jonathan Karl about whether recent failures to get gun control reform through Congress or agree a federal budget meant he was now powerless to pursue his own agenda, or "losing juice", as Karl memorably phrased it.
"If you put it that way, Jonathan … maybe I should just pack up and go home," joked a somewhat defensive president. But his tone has shifted noticeably since the confident swagger of Saturday night's stand-up comedy at the White House correspondents' dinner.
Across a host of issues, the White House is not just frustrated by Republican opposition in Congress, but increasingly humiliated. Gun control represented the worst setback, as Obama was not even able to rally enough Senate support to pass what would have looked like the bare minimum response to the Sandy Hook shooting back at the time of his inauguration speech in January.
But the long-running stalemate over fiscal policy also took a turn for the worse this weekend when the White House was forced to sign an exemption for the Federal Aviation Authority from the sweeping sequester budget cuts currently hitting many US public services. » | Dan Roberts | Tuesday, April 30, 2013
