Obama's conciliatory tone gives GOP critics pause

John McCain, the 2008 GOP nominee, used his NRA speech to talk about security along the Mexican border. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney attacked President Obama's approach to detainee issues. John R. Bolton, who served as George W. Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, found fault with what he called Obama's misunderstanding of "American exceptionalism."

"If you'll let me, I'll talk to you about a policy that has nothing to do with gun rights," said Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, before launching into a description of Democratic proposals to establish a trading market for carbon emissions.

The arrival of a big-city liberal president backed by Democratic majorities in Congress should have given single-issue conservative interest groups concerned with guns, abortion, and religion a lot of new material. Yet only four months after taking office, Obama appears to have already fulfilled one of the murkiest pledges of his candidacy: to declare a cease-fire in the culture wars.

"Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction," Obama said Sunday at Notre Dame University, where his commencement address was protested by antiabortion activists. "But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature."

Republicans are wrestling with how to respond to Obama's promises of big changes to the nation's healthcare, energy, finance, and foreign policy. But it may be his lack of interest in changing the status quo on social issues that most vexes parts of the conservative coalition. Can Obama make his most organized opposition obsolete just by giving them nothing to be angry about?

In addition to his conciliatory rhetoric validating the views of abortion opponents, Obama dismissed the Freedom of Choice Act - a bill designed to enshrine abortion rights in federal law - as "not my highest legislative priority," as he put it at a press conference last month.

While Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, has said that the administration would like to see a new ban on assault weapons, it too does not seem like much of a priority on a busy legislative calendar. The White House is similarly uninterested in stirring a public appetite for new regulations: when 14 people were killed in an upstate New York shooting rampage in April, the president released a mere three-sentence statement that made no mention that a gun had been used in the attacks.

Yesterday, Obama signed a bill changing regulations on credit-card companies even though it included a Republican-sponsored amendment allowing visitors to bring guns into national parks, a priority of NRA officials.

Obama has stalled plans to lift the military's ban on openly gay personnel, and has remained quiet about same-sex marriage even as more states have approved the practice in the early days of his term. When the White House included gay couples in its Easter celebration for the first time, it did so with little fanfare.

"He's trying not to give targets to the right," said Pete Wehner, a former domestic policy aide to President George W. Bush. "If you're a Second Amendment conservative, or if you're a profamily conservative, he's given you less of a target to shoot at."

"That's going to keep you presumably happy because you are not seeing policies you care about washed away or ones you won't like put into law. On the other hand, it means you're less prominent," said Wehner, now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. "You can't manufacture crises or pitched battles."

Conservatives appear to be counting on the idea that an impending Supreme Court nomination, to fill the seat of retiring Justice David Souter, will deliver the opportunity to rally around social issues that Obama has so far denied them.

"Liberal groups who escorted him down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day are looking for a bit of payback," Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele told the NRA. "They want a young, activist, left-wing justice who will leave a liberal legacy long after the Obama administration is over."

But if anything, liberal interest groups and House Democrats have been the ones so far disillusioned by Obama's tentative approach to cultural and social issues. Republicans may have to count on them to force the president's hand on controversial social issues like guns and immigration, according to one party strategist.

"Congressional Democrats will end up pushing something," said Ron Bonjean, who has worked for Republican leaders in both the House and Senate. "Obama may not push it, but would he veto something that comes across his desk? That's an open question."

Until then, single-issue conservatives may be left to celebrate small victories in the culture wars. In Phoenix, several speakers cited a reported increase in the number of Americans purchasing guns in recent months, which some analysts have attributed to concern about Obama's election.

"Let's give credit where credit is due," said Chris Cox, the NRA's chief lobbyist. "The Obama administration deserves credit for the only part of the economy that's going strong: gun sales."