With the parties at an impasse on stopping across-the-board budget cuts set to hit March 1, the White House is prepping another multimedia, cross-country drive to stoke public outrage against congressional Republicans.

Certain that the political winds are in their favor, they’re forgoing serious negotiations for a high-risk public offensive, banking almost entirely on the president’s ability to persuade. They believe that the GOP will be scared of taking the blame from an angry public — and the White House says this is just the kind of thing that gave them the victory they claimed in the fiscal cliff fight and the most recent standoff over the debt limit…

But if Republicans hold to their cuts-only approach — as they insist they will — and the sequester kicks in, Obama could face a fiscal crisis that threatens to tank the economy and sideline his top legislative priorities such as immigration reform and gun control…

“The president is going to try and pretend that his enemy on this is us,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner. “His enemy is reality. The president created the sequester and insisted on it, House Republicans have acted twice to replace it. If there’s going to be a solution here, he’s going to have to work with his own political party in the Senate.”