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WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama promised to change Washington's ways. Yet he's as caught up in them as ever.

As the hebdomad began, Obama kicked soured his re-election bid with a sunny video of grouping talking most their hopes and needs, the rattling image of life outside pedagogue politics.

By week's end, Obama was mired in budget negotiations, canceling trips and scrambling to split soured a polity shutdown that could exclusive counteract the public's establishment in his leadership.

It was the messy playing of governing, and how it's feat to be in this daylong crusade for incumbent Obama.

Beyond the exteroception for economic competitiveness he wants to speech about, Obama is chasing a second term patch disagreeable to attain a deeply separated polity work. He got bogged down in legislative tactics in his first two years, modify when he won fights on health care and another issues.

The content today is to refrain every that. He can't.

In this effort of leadership, the White House says Obama wrangled the budget cooperation he wanted, outlay cuts he based without shelving his priorities or accepting objectionable contract changes.

His brass portrayed it as an warning of nonpartisan cooperation of the highest stakes.

Yet the polity was on the bounds of closing, and whatever grouping were wondering how that could happen, or why.

This is change?

The showdown was a reminder that for every a president's powers, there's such beyond control. Think Libya, Egypt, Japan's earthquake, not to name Irak and Afghanistan.

In this case, the new House politico majority, led by Speaker Evangelist Boehner, seized on a must-pass budget bill to provide voice to frustrated voters and repast band conservatives who demanded outlay cuts.

It was brinksmanship fashion again in the capital, where nothing gets finished until the deadline. Sometimes not modify then.

In public, Obama proven to ready it at arm's length.

"I shouldn't hit to oversee a impact in which legislature deals with terminal year's budget," Obama said as the instance got short this week.

In fact, he was up to his neck in it.

Obama utilised a veto threat to attain country he would not accept the orbit of party outlay cuts. He said he would accept no more temporary extensions to ready the polity streaming for a whatever weeks at a instance unless there was a broader care in hand. He kept locution leaders had to behave same grown-ups.

The White House said his strategy was to stay behindhand the scenes, impact the phones and permit his senior aides do the negotiating. That identify of persona provided an inaugural for Republicans to discourse his leadership. It also led to rumblings from frustrated lawmakers in his possess band who desired the chair to openly attack the cuts Republicans wanted.

The White House figured it would verify those hits. It did.

A town poll in late March institute declining drawing of grouping who said Obama was a strong and deciding leader: a little more than half of those polled, compared with 60 proportionality digit assemblage past and 73 proportionality two eld ago.

The White House believed that a meliorate result would become if Obama didn't try to overheat the issue. Officials believed that grouping were worried most pedal prices, not a outlay squabble and that voters didn't lease Obama to be a legislator.

Obama would go open when it meant the most.

That was Tuesday. The chair dead got vocal.

He said Americans didn't poverty games but results. The practical move is what White House strategists believe module alter backwards the election-turning independents to Obama.

"There are whatever things we can't control," he said. "We can't curb earthquakes; we can't curb tsunamis; we can't curb uprisings on the another lateral of the world. What we can curb is our capacity to hit a reasoned, decent conversation between the parties and intend the playing of the American grouping done."

But it wasn't getting done, and his voice was not the exclusive digit environment the tone.

"The chair isn't leading," Boehner said Wednesday. "He didn't advance on terminal year's budget, and he understandably is not directive on this year's budget."

Obama met with Boehner and philosopher quaternary nowadays in the White House during the week. He still went to the metropolis Atlantic Wednesday to speech most energy. He looked comfortable, nearly carefree, as he laughed with workers at a wind-turbine company most their families and their cars.

But pedagogue had sucked him backwards in. By Friday, he canceled a activate to Indianapolis, scrapping the attention he desired to provide to decent energy.

He scrapped a weekend flight with his kinsfolk to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.

While employed to refrain a shutdown, Obama's team thought the White House would become discover OK in the public's mind if it came to that.

The thinking was that the chair had presented a commonsensible housing of agreeing to outlay cuts without feat likewise far, and that grouping would be angry with Republicans if the polity closed up partially over a contract difference most abortion.

Only when the finish grew most dire did it end.

But the budget mess showed how polity isn't supposed to operate. No concern who's to blame, every module be, including a chair streaming for election this instance from exclusive Washington's ways.

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EDITOR'S NOTE — White House Correspondent Ben Feller has awninged the Bush and Obama presidencies for The Associated Press.

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