Obama Now in Campaign Mode

Don't expect much to be done by the White House that's not directly connected to Obama's re-election campaign:

The White House is still a busy place, but priorities and attention are increasingly being sucked away to Chicago, home of President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.

Congressional negotiations on budget disagreements are adrift, Libya’s anti-American dictator is brutally retaking control of the country, organized Islamists are using the democratic openings in Arab countries to push their way towards power, gas-price increases are draining dollars from the stalled American economy, and nervous American employers are trying to avoid hiring expensive U.S. workers.

The administration’s public response to these downwards trends is to woo swing-voters with low-risk promises of negotiations with budget-cutting Republicans, showdowns with pollution-producing energy companies and the prospect of budget-crisis morality plays pitting Obama as the middle-class champion fighting the Republican dragon. Simultaneously, and largely off the established media’s radar screen, Obama’s campaign is using the federal agencies to deliver promised benefits to constituency groups.

Last Friday, the president summoned the White House press corps to announce his dispatch of missile-armed warships and other aid to high-tech, earthquake-shocked Japan, to announce further international negotiations about possible intervention in the Libyan civil-war, and to suggest that gas-prices are pushed up by the oil-companies’ reluctance to pump out more oil or price-gouging, but not by his economic or foreign policies. “If you are in a house that requires you to commute 50 miles everyday to your job, you’re not going to be able to sell your house immediately, particularly in this market…You may want to buy a fuel-efficient car, but you may not be able to afford it…[so if] we see any efforts to take advantage of these price spikes through price gouging, we’re going to go after that,” Obama said, in a clear message to the many, not-quite-poor, swing-voting whites in the mid-West that can deliver states’ electoral votes into his column in 2012.

Read the rest at The Daily Caller. As Michael Barone pointed out recently, when Obama was in the Illinois Senate he voted "Present" 129 times. He's now moved into "Present" mode in the White House.