Observers: Obama has been keeping far afield of Congress

WASHINGTON -- President Obama has not met with Republican leaders in Congress for 145 days, choosing instead to visit 20 states for 34 policy addresses and 34 campaign speeches.

The clampdown on bipartisan talks and uptick in partisan swipes at his opponents in Congress follows a disastrous series of negotiations in the spring and summer that narrowly avoided a government shutdown and a national default, diminishing the country's credit rating and its elected leaders' poll ratings.

Since then, Obama has purposefully altered his reputation for insisting on compromise — a trait that generated criticism from his base during an August bus tour of rural America. Instead, he has followed through on a threat he made to House Republican leader Eric Cantor in July to take his case "to the American people."

Since late September, he has sat for White House interviews with 20 local television stations from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Ore. Those have complemented his speeches around the country, about three-fourths of them in states considered crucial to his re-election.

Since late October, he has trumpeted 18 initiatives as part of a "We Can't Wait" campaign, designed to highlight executive actions Obama takes without Congress' involvement.

For a candidate who campaigned against Washington's petty politics and a president who tried to work with Republicans for most of his term, the change has been striking.

A year ago, he singled out Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell at a White House ceremony for his help in passing a payroll tax cut for 155 million Americans. Since the July debt-limit talks, he has spoken to McConnell once — by telephone.

Former lawmakers can't recall a time when a president and congressional leaders from the other party refused to work together for so long.

"It's an abdication of leadership on his part," says former Senate Republican leader Trent Lott. "You don't get to check out when you're president … whether you feel like you've been dealt with appropriately or not."

"In all the administrations I'm aware of, there's been tremendous communication and meetings, and ultimately cooperation," says former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt. "The Republicans are just locked in. They don't want to agree. They don't want to negotiate."

The seeds were planted for bad blood between Obama and GOP leaders 14 months ago, when McConnell told an interviewer that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." The comment has been recalled often by the White House as evidence the GOP can't be trusted.

After the debt-limit talks failed to yield the "grand bargain" sought by Obama and House Speaker John Boehner to cut $4 trillion from future budget deficits, Obama chose a new, public strategy. GOP leaders, he reasoned, would continue to oppose him at every turn and couldn't speak for their more conservative members anyway.

"The conclusion he drew after the summer … is to aggressively enlist the American people in these discussions," says David Axelrod, the campaign's chief strategist. "And I think that was the right thing to do."