Obama Gamble Pays Off With Approval of Arms Pact

By PETER BAKER
NYT

WASHINGTON — The final approval of a new arms control treaty with Russia may have been a foregone conclusion by the time senators stepped onto the floor on Wednesday. But that was not the way it looked one afternoon last month when White House officials rushed to the Oval Office to tell President Obama that his treaty might be dead.

The president and his team had built their entire strategy for obtaining approval of the treaty on winning over a single Republican senator deputized by his caucus to negotiate an accord — and that Republican, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, had just shocked the White House by pulling the plug on a deal for the year.

Some aides counseled Mr. Obama to stand down. Losing a treaty vote, as one put it, would be “a huge loss.” But Mr. Obama decided that afternoon to make one of the biggest gambles of his presidency and demand that the Senate approve the treaty by the year’s end. “We’ve just got to go ahead,” he told aides, who recounted the conversation on Wednesday.

Along the way, he had to confront his own reluctant party leadership and circumvent the other party’s leadership. He mounted a five-week campaign that married public pressure and private suasion. He enlisted the likes of Henry A. Kissinger, asked Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to help and sent a team of officials to set up a war room of sorts on Capitol Hill. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had at least 50 meetings or phone calls with senators.

(More here.)

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