Despite Post-Partisan Pledges, Obama Enters 'Campaign Mode' to Sell Stimulus

Despite a pledge to bridge the partisan divide in Washington, President Obama left the capital this week to deploy a battle-tested strategy of bypassing Congress and taking his policy proposals to the people.

The result was a political scene that more resembled the hard-knuckle presidential campaign than the diplomatic transition period.

Obama hit the stump and the airwaves to talk up his economic recovery package and shame its foes into supporting it. Republicans countered with press conferences blasting the Democratic agenda. Both sides traded fire in the editorial pages.

In a sense, things were back to normal in Washington after the euphoria of Inauguration Day. But while Obama didn't win any Republican friends in the process, Senate Democrats announced a fast-track deal on the legislation Wednesday afternoon. They seemed ready to send a bill to Obama's desk by his President's Day weekend deadline.

In going over the heads of lawmakers to appeal to the public, political scholars said the president showed a survival instinct that underscored his practical streak. By hitting the de facto campaign trail to promote his first major policy initiative, they said, he took shrewd advantage of his status as the only official (other than the vice president) whose constituency encompasses the entire nation.

"Every president has a carrot and a stick. ... That's the stick, going over the heads of Congress to the people," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

"The best presidents always are in campaign mode," he added. "He's got the ability to reach out to the whole country in a way that no member of Congress does."

Christopher C. Hull, adjunct government professor at Georgetown University and president of public policy firm Issues Management Inc., said Obama followed in the "time honored tradition" of Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats, as well as Ronald Reagan's and Bill Clinton's penchant for selling policies directly to the public.

But the pragmatist-in-chief also threw a little salt on his post-partisan promises.

"His appeals are very clearly breaking with the bipartisanship and changing-the-way-Washington-works that he talked about throughout his campaign," Hull said. "The tone that he is setting is relatively negative, relatively partisan, relatively political and relatively shrill, compared to what he said he was going to do."

After granting a round of media interviews last week and publishing an op-ed defense of his proposals, Obama held town-hall style meetings in hard-hit towns, first in Indiana and then in Florida.

On Wednesday, he visited a highway construction site in Springfield, Va., and on Thursday he plans to head to Peoria, Ill., to visit a Caterpillar manufacturing plant.

At every turn, including in his prime-time news conference Monday, he used tough rhetoric, warning of "catastrophe" if Congress did not act and accusing the bill's opponents of playing political games.

This drew recriminations from Republicans who said they were opposing the bill in earnest because they felt it was bloated with wasteful spending that would only balloon the national debt and drive up inflation.

"If he was promising to change the way of Washington, it didn't last very long," Republican strategist Terry Holt said.

He said Obama's team only undertook the public campaign for the stimulus because they bungled the handling of the bill at the outset.

"Public opinion on the stimulus package has cratered over the past two weeks," he said.

Yet even as taxpayers blasted Congress for the bill, a recent Gallup poll showed that a wide majority approved of the way Obama was handling the tense talks.

Even Holt had to hand him that.

"On the policy side, this has been a disaster. On the political side, he's doing pretty good," Holt said.

Sabato said the campaign-mode approach would serve Obama well in his presidency, provided he stays popular.

"Presidents use this method ... when their Gallup poll ratings are high," he said. "When they are mediocre or low, presidents work directly with senators and congressmen."

FOXNews.com's Judson Berger contributed to this report.