It is very clear that President Obama sees himself as a transforming leader, one who bends circumstances to his convictions and preferred goals. However his ability to validate his self-image by real legislative and policy accomplishments has been stymied by the domestic, political, and foreign policy choices he has made.
As a result, the window to further develop his legacy as more than a president whose advanced billing far outweighed his actual accomplishments in office is fast closing.
Major and real breakthroughs on the federal budget, Iranian nuclear ambitions, Middle East peace, and other festering international problems are unlikely.
Unilateral executive action on the environment and other matters are not likely to raise the president's stature, either now or in the future. That political vehicle has already been used too often and has given rise to worries that the Obama administration has become somewhat imperial, if not imperious.
The only administration initiative that has any chance of being considered a "major accomplishment" is immigration reform. It is the thin thread on which the president may be able to establish even a modest policy legacy.
Now the president has made very clear what he will and will not accept in any such bill that reaches his desk. In a an interview conducted as part of a presidential blitz with Spanish-language news organizations on behalf of the Senate's immigration legislation, Obama said quite directly that a pathway to citizenship for the country's 11.5 million illegal aliens "needs to be a part of the bill."
The Wall Street Journal, in an article entitled "Obama Says Immigration Must Be Considered as Package", wrote that "Mr. Obama rejected suggestions that the system could be overhauled without giving a pathway to illegal immigrants already here," and further that "It does not make sense to me, if we're gonna make this once-in-a-generation effort to finally fix the system, to leave the status of 11 million people or so unresolved, and certainly for us to have two classes of people in this country, full citizens, and people who are permanently resigned to a lower status."
That stance makes sense from the president's perspective. He has for many years promised a "comprehensive" immigration bill that includes a pathway to citizenship for the nation's 11.5 million illegal alien population.
So, there is no doubt that the president would like to sign the Senate Gang of Eight's immigration bill, or something very close to it.
But would he refuse to sign bill that provided legalization, but not citizenship, to the illegal alien population?
Would he refuse to sign a bill that legalized so-called "dreamers", and provide for legal status, but not citizenship, to other deserving illegal aliens?
Would he refuse to sign a bill that mandated a careful screening of applicants for amnesty before they got a provisional change in status?
I sincerely doubt it.
To do so would open himself to the potent political charge that he wasn't really willing to compromise and find common ground with a position that many, if not most Americans — not to mention Hispanics — would support.
Much worse from the president's standpoint, by refusing to sign a real compromise bill, he would be abandoning his one high-probability opportunity to score a real accomplishment and thus burnish his legacy.
So, on one hand we have a refusal to sign that would damage the president's "moderate" image, alienate Hispanics, deprive him of an easy legacy-enhancing accomplishment, and raise more questions about whether he really has been a "great" president and transformational leader.
On the other hand, President Obama could veto a bill that wasn't exactly or close to what he said he wanted. He could hope that this would lead to Democratic control of both houses of Congress so that he could pursue his legacy building during his final two years in office, including an immigration bill that would give him all that he wanted.
The risk here, obviously, is that his efforts to use the immigration issue to win back the House and keep the Senate might well fail, in part because key voting groups would be disappointed that the president refused to compromise and get a good bill when he had the chance.
For all the president's bluster, it is doubtful that he would risk even the modest improvements to his list of accomplishments that a signed immigration bill would add to his legacy's dim luster to take the risk that he could engineer a Democratic takeover of the House in 2014.
Hope is a campaign slogan. It has never been a personal and political strategy that the president relies on.
And these facts give the House and Senate Republicans extraordinary leverage on the immigration issue.
They just act as if they don't yet realize it.
Next: The GOP's Immigration Leverage; No, Really!
