New WH talking point: "The president is no longer tied to Washington, D.C."

“In terms of the president’s relationship with Congress in 2012 — the state of the debate, if you will — the president is no longer tied to Washington, D.C.,” spokesman Josh Earnest said in a news briefing in Honolulu.

The assertion is striking given that Obama, as president for nearly three years, is the symbol and personification of the federal government. It also offers a glimpse into an Obama reelection strategy that will target a “do-nothing” Congress much in the style of Harry S. Truman’s reelection campaign in 1948…

Nothing else on Obama’s menu requires congressional action as urgently as the tax cut, the White House said. If Congress were to let the cut expire at the end of February, tens of millions of Americans would be hit with a tax increase, harming the fragile economic recovery, the White House contends.

Earnest said that now that Obama was “sort of free from having to put out these fires, the president will have a larger playing field, as it were. And if that playing field includes working with Congress, all the better. But I think my point is that that’s no longer a requirement.”