IT looked as though he was finally behaving like someone who had, well, won the election. That was the impression of Washington pundits and insiders who were watching President Barack Obama during his last press conference of his first term in office on Monday, a week before he is scheduled to be inaugurated as president and start serving four more years in the White House.
Gone was Mr Nice Guy and the pledges he had made after his 2008 election to become a post-partisanship president and to work together with the Republican opposition to fashion a common national policy agenda. After four years, during which the Republicans threw everything except the kitchen sink at him - implying that he was born in Kenya and was a secret Muslim, accusing him of being "un-American" and "socialist", and most important, rejecting all his overtures to them to make deals with him over fiscal policy, health-care reform, immigration, and climate change - President Obama was clearly not in a mood for a romance with the Republican lawmakers who still control the House of Representatives. In fact, he seemed to be looking to pick a fight with them.
Indeed, Mr Obama insisted during the news conference that he would not negotiate with the Republicans over the US$16.4 trillion federal debt ceiling that Congress will have to lift in the next few weeks or face the risk of the US being forced to default on its debt.
Mr Obama charged that by demanding spending cuts in exchange for agreeing to raise the federal debt ceiling, the Republicans were threatening to hold "a gun at the head of the American people" and vowed that he would not play that game as he did in summer of 2011 when the Congressional Republicans did extract from him major concessions on spending as part of a deal to raise the government's borrowing limit. Not again!, pledged the president.
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