Dunn said that in August, as the president’s aides planned for the fall, they made “a fundamental decision that we needed to be more aggressive in both protecting our position and in delineating our differences with those who were attacking us.”
“It was a time for us to look at the extraordinary success we’ve had in terms of legislation but also to look at where we needed to be more aggressive in defining what the choices are, and in protecting and pushing forward our agenda,” she said.
The campaign underscores how deeply political the Obama White House is in its daily operations — with a strong focus on redrawing the electoral map and discrediting the personalities and ideas that have powered the conservative movement over the past 20 years…
Privately, officials have talked with relish for months of the potential to isolate the GOP as a narrow party of white, Southern conservatives with little appeal to independent-minded voters…
Charlie Black, a Republican lobbyist who was senior political adviser to last year’s presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said the White House salvos are “a far cry from the post-partisan, consensus-driven, unifying approach” that was Obama’s signature during the campaign.
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