The President Wills Himself Invisible

Time’s newly anointed “Man  of  the Year” spends a news-conference hour asking adversaries to take him out of equations, telling Tea Party members to overlook Obama animosity to make a fiscal cliff deal and NRA members “who are mothers and fathers” to join in avoiding future Newtown massacres.

Time says “We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America." Yet effacing himself seems to be the President’s primary strategy.

Can it work? As Tea Party Republicans face abandoning Boehner’s Plan B and Joe Biden strives for common ground on curbing assault weapons, clearing the air of anti-Obama rhetoric won’t be easy.

The Speaker will have to climb down from his own petard, and the president of the gun death lobby will have to make members forget that only this summer he refused even to talk to the White House.  "Why should I or the NRA” he huffed, “go sit down with a group of people that have spent a lifetime trying to destroy the Second Amendment in the United States?"

Today the President promises, “We are going to need to work on making access to mental health care at least as easy as access to guns.”

To get that done, he might want to start with his own opposition in Washington. That won’t eliminate Obama hatred as an obstacle in Congress, but the GOP crazies could benefit from the therapy.