Tiff on tarmac as Obama riles dominatrix of illegal immigration

OPINION: Republicans obsess on the idea of sending their best and toughest to do battle with the president

WHAT IS it with Barack Obama’s penchant for getting in tangles with blond politicians on airport tarmacs? Usually, tarmacs are for joyous welcomes or teary goodbyes. But No Drama Obama saves his rare tempests for the runway.

In the last primary season, the tension in the relationship between Hillary Clinton, who had expected to glide to the nomination, and the upstart younger senator from Illinois came to a head one day in December 2007 as both were preparing to board their aircraft in Washington to go to an Iowa debate.

Clinton had sent word that she wanted to talk to Obama. Standing in front of her plane, she apologised to him for the comments of her co-chairman in New Hampshire, Billy Shaheen, who had warned that Republicans would pounce on Obama’s confessions of cocaine and marijuana use.

But given the opening, Obama dived in, telling Clinton that she should intervene to stop the pattern of insinuations and attacks by her supporters, including one by a volunteer in Iowa who had forwarded an email claiming Obama was a Muslim.

That’s when Clinton got upset and began gesticulating, giving Obama a piece of her mind about what she saw as unfair attacks on his side.

Obama gently put his hand on her arm “to chill her out”, as an aide later told me.

But Clinton did not like it, feeling she was being held in place and patronised, even “manhandled,” as her aide put it to a reporter.

On Wednesday, Obama had another bristly tarmac moment with Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona, who met Air Force One when the president landed in Phoenix. The toxic dominatrix of illegal immigration, the woman who turned every Latino in her state into a suspect, was flustered and gesticulating at the president as he put his hand on her arm to chill her out. Brewer complained afterward that she had felt “unnerved” and “a little bit threatened” by Obama and that he had walked away while she was in mid sentence.

Brewer told Monica Crowley, subbing for Sean Hannity on Fox News, that she had given the president a letter inviting him to join her at the border to discuss enforcement. She said he shot back that her account of a 2010 Oval Office meeting on the topic, published in her book, Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Mediaand Cynical Politicos to Secure America's Border,was distorted.

"He was patronising," Brewer wrote about the president in her book, adding: "He's treating me like the cop he had over for a beer after he bad-mouthed the Cambridge police." The president's recent performances are boosting sales of Brewer's book and Al Green's, Let's Stay Together.

With typical Fox balance, Crowley told Brewer that she admired her for “getting in the president’s grill”, adding, “you go, girl”. The president can be thin-skinned, but the governor can be fat-headed.

The constitution is more threatened by Brewer’s racial profiling than the governor was by the president’s fact-checking. Brewer’s grasp of facts is tenuous, after all: She told the Arizona Republic in 2010 that her father died fighting the Nazis in Germany, when he died a decade after the end of the war, which he spent working at an ammunition factory in Nevada.

Both of Obama’s tarmac tiffs worked in his favour. After his encounter with Clinton, he told advisers that it was the first time he knew he could beat her because he saw fear in her eyes.

After his brouhaha with Brewer, dubbed “the dust-up in the desert”, he became a hero to the Hispanics he had gone west to court. They loved seeing their Cruella de Vil get dressed down.

Everything is breaking Obama’s way, as Mitt and Newt rip into each other in vicious adverts and debates like alligators going after house pets.

Romney was tutored in Florida by Brett O’Donnell, a new debate coach.

Too bad he can’t find a conviction coach.

O’Donnell manned up Mittens and taught him how to pummel Newt in “moments of strength”, as the Republican strategist Alex Castellanos calls them. The funny thing is that the reason Gingrich soared in South Carolina, before faltering here, was that Republicans are so afraid of debates with the president that they are obsessed with sending forth their toughest adversary for him.

They seem to have forgotten that, while Obama has had dazzling moments of strength in executing Osama and in swashbuckling derring-do against Somali pirates – if not in dealing with Congress – he was no Abe Lincoln in debates. He did not like debating and Michelle urged him to be more visceral. He often faded onstage because he stubbornly refused to accept debates as alpha combat rather than beta seminars. He disdained anything he saw as superficial politics, from soundbites to macho put-downs.

If Obama continues to resist the gladiatorial subtext, while Romney embraces it, the debates could be more evenly matched than the Republicans dare to dream.