His Swagger Radiates no Sweetness.

Observers have seen it dozens of times:  Our slim President’s athletic, waist-level fist-pumping jog down the steps of Air Force One – alone, confidently smiling, immaculately dressed in a dark business suit,  complementing shirt and silk necktie – jauntily disembarking from the boarding ramp.

It’s the vision of a U.S. chief executive completely in control of the ship-of-state, a position from which he has not been reluctant to use the full power conferred on him by the electorate. 

After the 2012 national election, the President invoked his assertion that the entirety of Americans had indisputably endorsed him to fix culpability on anyone in the Congress who doesn’t concur with his re-election ‘mandate:'

Writing in the Washington Post, Michael Gerson reinforces this view:

“Here is my [Gerson’s] nomination for the lowest moment of the ‘fiscal cliff’ debate. Right before Christmas, President Obama met with House Speaker John Boehner in the Oval Office. ‘He told Mr. Boehner,’ according to the Wall Street Journal, ‘that if the sides didn’t reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech to tell the country Republicans were at fault.’”

Such is the uncompromising stance which the President of the United States brings to this country at the onset of his second term.  But this practice is not new: 

In a 2010 State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama humiliated John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in full view of a joint Congressional session and before an internationally televised audience.

The only apparent recourse that a chastised Chief Justice Roberts had was to sit silently in his front row seat with the other justices, and to silently mouth the words, “Not so.  Not so.”

That dust-up was in reference to Mr. Obama’s disagreement with a Supreme Court ruling (Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission) over the sources of campaign support, a decision which the President intensely opposed. 

Yet, in his subsequent 2012 campaign for re-election, Mr. Obama successfully enjoyed the benefits of the Supreme Court’s ruling which permits corporations to spend millions of dollars to purchase ads favorable to the candidate of their choice.

This was the very same ruling for which the President had publicly excoriated Chief Justice John Roberts in 2010.

Now fresh from a re-election victory, President Obama is poised for another confrontation:  This time with the GOP-controlled House of Representatives over the upcoming non-debate about raising the debt ceiling.

In a front-page, above-the-fold story in Tuesday’s Washington Post, Zachary A. Goldfarb and Philip Rucker confirmed the President’s intransigence:

“President Obama warned congressional Republicans on Monday that raising the federal debt ceiling is non-negotiable . . .”

Unless the President’s threat is a feint, expect him to unsheathe his figurative two-by-four and to use it before a world-wide-audience in the next joint session of Congress to strike John Boehner and the GOP upside the head, hoping to bludgeon them both into compliance.

So goes the game inside the Beltway.

NOTE:  In a complementary column in which he discusses President Obama’s reinforced obduracy, Post opinion writer Dana Milbank discusses how “President Congeniality talks tough.”