By PETER BAKER (New York Times)

WASHINGTON — Two days before joining other presidents in Texas to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, President Obama tackled enduring inequality himself on Tuesday, in this case economic disparity based on gender.

For better or worse, Johnson represented the high-water mark for American presidents pushing through sweeping legislation — not just the Civil Rights Act, but the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the Fair Housing Act and major measures on immigration, education, gun control and clean air and water. No president since has approached that level of legislative success, although there are people who argue that is a good thing because government should not be so intrusive.

But Mr. Obama and many Democrats are not among them. At this stage of his presidency, Mr. Obama has become a symbol of liberal frustration over his inability to use government to bring about change. Republicans publicly, and some Democrats privately, blame Mr. Obama for not doing more to work across the aisle. The White House and many Democrats scoff at that, laying stalemate at the feet of what they call an obstructionist Republican Party.

Certainly, Mr. Obama can point to landmark actions from his first term, most notably his health care program, the most significant expansion of the social safety net since the Johnson era. He also pushed through an economic stimulus intended to pull the country back from the abyss and Wall Street regulations devised to avert another crisis. But those actions were accomplished in his first two years, back when he had a Democratic Congress and before sky-high deficits brought on an age of austerity.

Mr. Obama now confronts the likelihood that he may not come close to anything like those first 24 months in his final six years in office. Day in and day out, the president with the grand aspirations finds himself signing orders and memos that barely move the needle toward the goals he outlined for himself.

“I’m going to do my small part,” he said on Tuesday as he signed the executive measures.

Jeffrey A. Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said Mr. Obama’s health program might ultimately be seen as similar to the lasting legacies of the Great Society or the New Deal.

But the reality of the modern presidency, he said, is that big things are best done right away before second terms devolve into an exercise in aggravation. “It’s more difficult to achieve massive change after that initial mandate because money and media and constant pinpricks can very effectively take the wind out of any president’s sails very quickly,” Mr. Engel said.

When domestic prospects recede, presidents often turn to foreign policy, where they have fewer constraints and Congress is a bit player. Mr. Obama inherited an empowered national security presidency from George W. Bush and has used it to wage a vigorous drone war and preside over an expansive surveillance program in the pursuit of terrorists.

But he has also had a difficult time dealing with Russia, Syria and the Middle East peace process, and has projected a more restrained American role in the world. If anything, Mr. Obama seems intent on being the anti-Johnson by withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan rather than letting an overseas quagmire like Vietnam come to dominate his presidency and overshadow any domestic accomplishments.

Washington has changed in many ways since the Great Society. Johnson enjoyed such large Democratic majorities that even when his party lost 47 House seats in the 1966 midterm elections, Democrats still held 61 more than Republicans. The country faced crises both parties felt compelled to address. And political deal making then was different with pork projects called earmarks that are now banned — seedier, perhaps, but also effective.

Since the Johnson era, the country has grown more skeptical about government. Even Mr. Obama’s biggest legislative project, the health care program, was based on helping uninsured Americans buy coverage in the private market, rather than setting up a government-run system like Medicare. But it still stirred widespread opposition.

And the political parties, both ideologically diverse in the 1960s, have grown more homogeneous.

“The nature of politics has changed,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the White House communications director. “The electorate is more polarized. I think often members of Congress are more concerned with how the voter on the more enthusiastic side of their party is going to react than they would have 50 years ago. That’s a real change.”

Still, few things irritate Mr. Obama and his team more than the comparison to Johnson, which they consider facile and unfair. The notion that Mr. Obama should exert more energy in cajoling, bargaining and even pressuring lawmakers is a common assessment on both sides of the aisle, but it remains unpersuasive in the Oval Office, despite Johnson’s successes.

“When he lost that historic majority, and the glow of that landslide victory faded, he had the same problems with Congress that most presidents at one point or another have,” Mr. Obama told The New Yorker’s David Remnick last year. “I say that not to suggest that I’m a master wheeler-dealer, but rather to suggest that there are some structural institutional realities to our political system that don’t have much to do with schmoozing.”

Not everyone accepts that. Marvin Watson, who was Johnson’s chief of staff, said he made no judgment about Mr. Obama or any other president but rejected the notion that Johnson lost sway over time.

“There’s not much difference,” he said. “They talk about that because they’re trying to find an excuse why it was done at one time and why it’s not been done since.”

Mr. Watson agreed that Johnson had a powerful majority but noted that he made a point of negotiating with Republicans anyway. “We just had a feeling that all positions should be represented,” he said.

Mark K. Updegrove, director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum and the organizer of this week’s conference celebrating the Civil Rights Act, said comparisons were hard to make.

“Washington was fundamentally different when L.B.J. was king of the jungle,” he said. “There are many factors there, but one is that I don’t think lawmakers know each other as well as they did in L.B.J.’s day. One of the ways he was able to get things done is he read the motivations of his colleagues so well. And that was because he knew them so well.”

After Mr. Obama experienced a year of scant legislative progress — he failed to push through even a modest gun control bill in 2013 after the schoolhouse massacre in Newtown, Conn. — the president has turned to a strategy of enacting smaller executive actions and using his bully pulpit to persuade states and companies to pick up the cause of, say, raising the minimum wage. And he still has the power to make major changes unilaterally, as he plans to do through environmental regulations of greenhouse gas emissions.

“He would prefer that Congress pick up this legislation and pass it,” Ms. Palmieri said after Tuesday’s event on pay equity. “It irks him sometimes. But he’s also a pragmatic guy.”

She added: “Washington’s not the end-all, be-all. It’s the United States of America, and he’s the leader of it.”

By PETER BAKERAPRIL  (New York Times)

COLLEGE STATION, Tex. — With eyes increasingly on him, Jeb Bush signaled on Sunday the kind of campaign he would mount if he runs for president, one arguing against ideological purity tests while challenging party orthodoxy on issues like immigration and education.

Even as he sharply criticized President Obama for his handling of foreign affairs and health care, Mr. Bush made clear that he would run against the style of politics that has characterized recent Republican nominating contests. He said he would decide by the end of the year, in part on whether he thinks he could avoid “the vortex of a mud fight” with a “hopeful” message.

“We need to elect candidates that have a vision that is bigger and broader, and candidates that are organized around winning the election, not making a point,” Mr. Bush told an audience at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum. “Campaigns ought to be about listening and learning and getting better. I do think we’ve lost our way.” He added, “I’m not being critical of my party, but campaigns themselves are reflective of this new America.

Barbara Bush attended a town-hall-style meeting in College Station, Tex., at which Jeb Bush spoke. Credit Ben Sklar for The New York Times

In perhaps his most expansive public discussion yet of a possible candidacy, Mr. Bush, a longtime supporter of overhauling immigration laws, warned against “harsh political rhetoric” on the subject and urged more compassion for those who enter the country illegally for economic reasons. “Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony; it’s an act of love,” he said. “It’s a different kind of crime. There should be a price paid. It shouldn’t rile people up that people are actually coming to provide for their families.”

Mr. Bush, the former two-term governor of Florida and the son and brother of former presidents, returned to the bosom of the family’s extensive political network to discuss his future and the country’s. His town hall-style conversation capped a three-day reunion celebrating the 25th anniversary of the first Bush presidency, ensuring that much of the talk would center on whether there will be a third.

Mr. Bush has taken few known steps to start building an organization and so it still may amount to nothing more than flirtation. But whereas a few months ago veteran courtiers of the nation’s most prominent modern Republican dynasty thought the second son was not planning to run, many of the same people left Sunday saying he seems more engaged in the possibility.

“He sounds like a candidate to me,” said Joe Hagin, who worked in the White House for both President Bushes. “People are standing back and saying the country is ready for somebody who’s serious.”

Andrew H. Card Jr., who likewise worked in both administrations, including as George W. Bush’s chief of staff, said Republicans should draft Jeb. “If Jeb Bush doesn’t run for president, shame on us,” he said. “He is demonstrating the kind of leadership we desperately need both in our party and in our nation.”

Whether the rest of the party agrees remains to be seen. Nowhere could Jeb Bush expect a more supportive crowd than here at the museum honoring his father. Among those most fervent about a run, according to former aides, is the elder George Bush, who sat in front of the auditorium. The skepticism within the party, however, was represented by the woman sitting next to him: Barbara Bush, the former first lady, who last year publicly suggested the country does not need another Bush in the White House. Last month, she tempered that comment by saying Jeb would be “the most qualified person in the country.”

Even as the band seemed itching to get back together, some Republicans privately acknowledged that a repeat engagement faces plenty of hurdles, not least of which the sense that the party may have moved beyond the Bushes. Some observers noted that for all the support for Jeb Bush among his father’s allies, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice seemed to generate more enthusiastic applause earlier in the weekend.

Mr. Bush appeared to recognize that the siren calls of the will-he-or-won’t-he stage would give way to the fractiousness of actually being a candidate. “It turns out that not running has generated more interest than if I said I was running,” he noted during the session, portions of which were broadcast on Fox News.

Mr. Bush said two factors were driving his decision: the impact on his family and his ability to wage the kind of campaign he wants. “Can a candidate run with a hopeful, optimistic message, hopefully with enough detail to give a sense that it’s not just idle words and not get back into the vortex of the mud fight?” he asked. In that vein, he offered praise for Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a putative rival who has been under fire. “He’s the real deal,” Mr. Bush said. “He’s a spectacular guy.”

Jeb Bush seems a cinch to be the nominee and a strong contender against Hillary or any other opponent. One can only hope, as a Democrat,…

He was more willing to criticize Mr. Obama, naturally. “Leading from behind is so odd to me,” he said of the president’s foreign policy. And he said it was absurd for Mr. Obama to be “doing a victory dance” over the enrollment of seven million people in his new health care program given what Mr. Bush considers its deep structural flaws.

But he made clear he would not shrink from views scorned by the dominant wing of the party. He defended his commitment to the so-called Common Core set of educational standards. “I just don’t feel compelled to run for cover when I think this is the right thing to do for our country,” he said.

Offstage, Mr. Bush gave indications of interest throughout the weekend. He approached one guest to ask if he was still working for another Republican known to be positioning for a presidential campaign; told yes, Mr. Bush moved on without further comment.

As for weariness with dynastic candidates, Ron Kaufman, political director in the first Bush White House, pointed to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s potential candidacy. “That takes that issue away,” he said. “It’s pretty hard to say, ‘Oh, another Bush’ when you’ve got another Clinton.”

Jeb Bush took it all in. As he made his way out of the barbecue, an admirer stopped him. “I was feeling sorry for you for all the pressure being put on you this weekend,” the man said. “But then I got over it.”

By GINGER THOMPSON and SARAH COHENAPRIL (New York Times)

With the Obama administration deporting illegal immigrants at a record pace, the president has said the government is going after “criminals, gang bangers, people who are hurting the community, not after students, not after folks who are here just because they’re trying to figure out how to feed their families.”

But a New York Times analysis of internal government records shows that since President Obama took office, two-thirds of the nearly two million deportation cases involve people who had committed minor infractions, including traffic violations, or had no criminal record at all. Twenty percent — or about 394,000 — of the cases involved people convicted of serious crimes, including drug-related offenses, the records show.

Deportations have become one of the most contentious domestic issues of the Obama presidency, and an examination of the administration’s record shows how the disconnect evolved between the president’s stated goal of blunting what he called the harsh edge of immigration enforcement and the reality that has played out.

Illegal immigrants on a bus in Broadview, Ill., last year, to be deported. Deportations have become one of the most contentious issues of the Obama years. Credit Leslye Davis/The New York Times

Mr. Obama came to office promising comprehensive immigration reform, but lacking sufficient support, the administration took steps it portrayed as narrowing the focus of enforcement efforts on serious criminals. Yet the records show that the enforcement net actually grew, picking up more and more immigrants with minor or no criminal records.

Interviews with current and former administration officials, as well as immigrant advocates, portray a president trying to keep his supporters in line even as he sought to show political opponents that he would be tough on people who had broken the law by entering the country illegally. As immigrant groups grew increasingly frustrated, the president held a succession of tense private meetings at the White House where he warned advocates that their public protests were weakening his hand, making it harder for him to cut a deal. At the same, his opponents in Congress insisted his enforcement efforts had not gone far enough.

Five years into his presidency, neither side is satisfied.

“It would have been better for the administration to state its enforcement intentions clearly and stand by them, rather than being willing to lean whichever way seemed politically expedient at any given moment,” said David Martin, the deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security until December 2010. “They lost credibility on enforcement, despite all the deportations, while letting activists think they could always get another concession if they just blamed Obama. It was a pipe dream to think they could make everyone happy.”

Various studies of court records and anecdotal reports over the past few years have raised questions about who is being deported by immigration officials. The Times analysis is based on government data covering more than 3.2 million deportations over 10 years, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and provides a more detailed portrait of the deportations carried out under Mr. Obama.

The demographics of those being removed today are not all that different from those removed over the years. Most are Mexican men under the age of 35. But many of their circumstances have changed.

The records show the largest increases were in deportations involving illegal immigrants whose most serious offense was listed as a traffic violation, including driving under the influence. Those cases more than quadrupled from 43,000 during the last five years of President George W. Bush’s administration to 193,000 during the five years Mr. Obama has been in office. In that same period, removals related to convictions for entering or re-entering the country illegally tripled under Mr. Obama to more than 188,000.

The data also reflect the Obama administration’s decision to charge immigration violators who previously would have been removed without formal charges. In the final year of the Bush administration, more than a quarter of those caught in the United States with no criminal record were returned to their native countries without charges. In 2013, charges were filed in more than 90 percent of those types of cases, which prohibit immigrants from returning for at least five years and exposing those caught returning illegally to prison time.

Ivan Maldonado, 18, on stairs, dropped out of high school to work in a factory after his father was deported. Credit Brendan Bannon for The New York Times

“For years, the Obama administration’s spin has been that they are simply deporting so-called ‘criminal aliens,’ but the numbers speak for themselves,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. “In truth, this administration — more than any other — has devastated immigrant communities across the country, tearing families away from loved ones, simply because they drove without a license, or re-entered the country desperately trying to be reunited with their family members.”

Administration officials say the deportations are a result of a decade in which Congress has passed tougher immigration laws, increased funding for enforcement and stymied efforts to lay out a path to legal residency for the bulk of nation’s 11.5 million illegal immigrants. “The president is concerned about the human cost of separating families,” said Cecilia Muñoz, the White House domestic policy adviser. “But it’s also true that you can’t just flip a switch and make it stop.”

In the spring of 2012, Mr. Obama announced a way for illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children — so called “Dreamers” — to avoid deportation. Facing a new wave of protests, he announced two weeks ago a review of the administration’s deportation programs in an effort to make them “more humane.”

Republicans immediately pushed back, warning that the changes he had already made had weakened enforcement. Despite the record deportations, they said his shift in emphasis to the border had resulted in a decline in the removals from the interior of the country — a trend borne out by the records. And while immigrant advocates and some leading Democrats are outraged by the administration’s policy of penalizing illegal entry at the border, many Republicans have accused the administration of using those cases to inflate its deportation numbers.

“The administration has carried out a dramatic nullification of federal law,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama. “Under the guise of setting ‘priorities’, the administration has determined that almost anyone in the world who can enter the United States is free to illegally live, work and claim benefits here as long as they are not caught committing a felony or other serious crime.”

The information on 3.2 million cases, obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, log every removal handled by the agency but do not provide enough information to determine which cases represent repeated deportations of the same person.

In places like Painesville, Ohio, a small town on the shore of Lake Erie sustained for decades by immigrants who work in greenhouses and factories, the spate of deportations has been felt one person at a time.

Anabel Barron, who has lived in the United States for nearly two decades, was facing deportation after being stopped for speeding and driving without a license. Her record showed that she had been removed previously and she said she returned to be with her four American-born children. At a regular Tuesday night meeting of immigrants at a converted church, she was fretting about her coming hearing.

Esubio Moctezuma, right, was deported, but returned after winning a court fight. Credit Brendan Bannon for The New York Times

“I am afraid of being deported,” she said. “But for my children it’s worse. They don’t sleep the same. They don’t eat. They don’t want to go to school because they are afraid I am not going to be there when they get home.”

Deportations began rising sharply in the final years of the Bush administration. Having failed to win comprehensive reform in part because opponents argued that sufficient progress had not been made in securing the borders, that administration undertook a sweeping immigration crackdown. It stepped up military-style raids on factories and farms and granted local police the authority to check the immigration status of foreigners they suspected of being in the country illegally. Deportations reached 383,000 in 2008.

Congress supported the moves, doubling the immigration agency’s budget to $5.5 billion in 2008, and imposed a mandate that required the immigration agency to detain a daily average of 34,000 immigrants.

Mr. Obama attacked those policies during his 2008 campaign, saying, “When communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel, when all that’s happening, the system just isn’t working.” He criticized his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona, for abandoning the push for immigration reform when it became “politically unpopular,” and promised to make it a priority in his first year in office.

But that promise collided with the reality of the recession and the bruising fight to get a financial stimulus package through Congress. “We did stimulus, and then, as we calculated the rest of the agenda, we saw health care as possible, energy as sort of possible, but super hard, and immigration as impossible,” said a former senior White House official. “The votes just weren’t there.”

Like Mr. Bush, both Mr. Obama and his first Department of Homeland Security secretary, the former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, believed that to win comprehensive reform, they needed to demonstrate a commitment to enforcing existing laws. The Obama administration set out to keep deportation numbers up, but to make enforcement “smarter.”

Immigration officials set a goal of 400,000 deportations a year — a number that was scrawled on a whiteboard at their Washington headquarters. The agency deployed more agents to the border, according to several former immigration officials, where finding and removing illegal immigrants is legally and politically easier. The administration attempted to tread more carefully in the interior of the country, where illegal immigrants have typically been settled longer. It ended the worksite raids and rolled back the local police’s broad discretion to check foreigners’ immigration status. Instead, it expanded a pilot project started under Mr. Bush that required the state and local police to check everyone fingerprinted during an arrest.

Deportations rose sharply in the final years of the Bush administration, and have remained high under President Obama.

More people are being removed from the border. Meanwhile a growing portion of those caught illegally crossing the border have lived in the country for years.

Mr. Obama said he would focus on removing people who had committed serious crimes, but the percentage of deportees with either minor infractions or no criminal offenses at all remains high, especially at the border.

The Obama administration has expanded the use of removal proceedings that expedite deportations without providing an opportunity for appeal.

Source: New York Times analysis of more than 3.2 million individual actions taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Excludes deportations that are handled exclusively by Border Patrol.

The change was made partly to address charges of racial profiling, but the new program — called Secure Communities — greatly expanded the pool of people who were checked, ICE officials said. And those found living in the United States illegally could be turned over to the immigration authorities regardless of the charges against them.

A June 2010 memo from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement director at the time, John Morton, for the first time set priorities for enforcement. They included any immigrants who had entered the country illegally, overstayed visas or had ignored prior deportation orders, regardless of their criminal history or how long they had lived in the United States. Although the memo was meant to focus enforcement, the categories were so broad, former officials of the immigration agency said, that they easily covered a third of the country’s 11.5 million illegal immigrants.

The administration also broadened the use of expedited proceedings, which gave illegal immigrants limited opportunities to consult a lawyer, seek asylum or present extenuating circumstances to judges. The number of expedited removals nearly doubled from the Bush to the Obama administrations. The Obama administration also expanded the pursuit of people who had failed to comply with previous deportation orders. And a majority of them involved immigrants who either had no criminal history, or had been convicted for immigration or traffic offenses.“Even as we recognize that enforcing the law is necessary,” Mr. Obama said in a 2011 speech in El Paso, “we don’t relish the pain that it causes in the lives of people who are just trying to get by and get caught up in the system.”

Painesville, Ohio, 30 miles east of Cleveland, offers a snapshot of some people caught up in the system. Every Tuesday night at a nondenominational church downtown, several dozen immigrant families cram together to talk about ways they can help loved ones who are either facing deportation or who have already been removed. The stories spill out so fast, and they all seem to share the same general narrative arc — immigrant drives through red or yellow light, police officer asks for driver’s license, immigrant lands in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, children reel from uncertainty.

“It’s been hard without my husband here,” said Elizabeth Perez, a 35-year-old American-born woman and a former Marine who briefly served in Afghanistan. Her husband was deported to Mexico in June 2010 after the police detained him during a traffic stop and the authorities found 14-year-old misdemeanor charges for assault and marijuana possession.

As she spoke, her 3-year-old son was fidgeting wildly in her arms and tugging on her long hair. Her 4-year-old daughter had plopped onto the floor and began screaming for her mother’s attention. “We were supposed to do this together,” she said, trying to quiet her restless brood. “Raise the kids, I mean.”

Esperanza Pacheco, who said she has lived illegally in the United States for 20 years, was detained with her husband three years ago for illegally re-entering the country. He was deported, but he was allowed to return after winning a court fight last year. And her deportation has been temporarily suspended. Still, she said, the ordeal hangs over her four daughters. The eldest of the girls, 16-year-old Esmeralda Moctezuma, piped up, “School is hard because we feel like people are pointing at us.”

An informal tally among the immigrants gathered that recent Tuesday night found a total of 22 people who either had a spouse who had been deported or were in deportation proceedings themselves. All told, those parents had 59 children. All but nine of the children were born in this country.

Five of them had fathers who were deported, and two of the men had died of exposure in the Arizona desert trying to make it back to their families.

The last word David Lomeli’s three children had of their father was the note from forensics officials who found his remains in July 2012. It read, “Subject was lying on his stomach with his head facing north. He was lying on a ripped-open black trash bag. The body was in an advanced state of decomposition with the skull fully exposed. He was wearing blue jeans (no shoes, socks or shirt). Subject appears to have been at this location for approximately one month.”

Half a dozen of the children had dropped out of school to help fill the void left by their fathers’ deportations. “It’s like a light that was inside of them has gone out,” said Manuela Martinez, referring to her six sons.

In April 2010, an 11-year-old girl named Arlette Rocha, with long brown hair and a cherub’s cheeks, was found hanging from the stairway at home in an apparent suicide some eight months after her father was deported to Mexico. Her mother had taken a job on the second shift at a local plastics molding factory, forcing Arlette to take care of three younger siblings.

When the family petitioned to have the father’s deportation reversed, Dr. Archie S. Wilkinson, who had tried to resuscitate Arlette, wrote a letter to authorities, pleading with them to return him for the sake of her surviving siblings.

Dr. Wilkinson wrote that in his view, Arlette had been suffering “from the profound grief of missing her dad, and the extra burden placed on her when their family’s main support was taken away.” He ended, writing, “Please give this family a chance.”

One teenager’s plea reached all the way to the White House. Ivan Maldonado, 18, who lives in what has become a typical mixed-status immigrant household, was 3 years old when his parents illegally moved him and an older brother to the United States from Mexico. His parents had four more sons in Ohio. Then in 2010, their father was deported after the authorities found he had failed to obey a previous order.

Janet Murguia, the president of the National Council of La Raza, the country’s largest Hispanic civil rights organization, introducing President Obama in 2011. She now attacks him as the “deporter in chief.” Credit Pablo Martinez Monsivai/Associated Press

His mother has been allowed to stay to take care of the children, and Mr. Maldonado and his older brother have been granted temporary legal status.

In 2011, Mr. Maldonado, who recently dropped out of high school to work at the same factory that once employed his father, went on a trip to Washington organized by advocates where he shared his story with Ms. Muñoz, Mr. Obama’s lead adviser on immigration. “She told me she would never forget me,” he recalled. “It made me feel that maybe there was hope my dad might come home.”

The issue of deportations has reached the White House repeatedly, turning immigration into a contentious issue between Mr. Obama and the Hispanic and Asian communities that are a critical part of his political base.

“We assumed that a Democratic president who wanted to move immigration reform would not pursue a strategy of deporting the people who he was intent on legalizing,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change. “That was a totally wrong assumption. And there is a lot of anger about that.”

One of the first confrontations played out in March 2010, when immigrant organizations announced plans to hold a march in Washington to demand that Congress pass immigration reform and that Mr. Obama stop the expansion of Secure Communities. Three former administration officials said the White House quickly began an effort aimed at damage control, summoning leading immigrant advocates to meet with the president.

Having just emerged from a bruising fight for health care reform, the president saw the sudden pressure from immigration groups as a betrayal, the former aides said. But, at the White House meeting, the advocates also expressed betrayal.

“They were like: ‘This deportation thing is important. Families are being ripped apart,’ ” recalled a former senior White House official, who requested anonymity to recount the meeting. “They’re almost crying. Their faces are turning red. Every one of them had a story.”

Chung-Wha Hong, the former executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, recalled that the president “kept saying that he was not above the law, and that if we were suggesting that he stop enforcing the law then there was no point in continuing the conversation.” She added: “We weren’t asking him not to enforce the law. Our point was simply that there were things he could do to protect good people from bad laws.”

At some point, the former White House official recalled, the president made clear he had heard enough.

“Finally the president was like, ‘Hey, you know what? You don’t have to convince me. I’m dealing with a Congress that won’t move on this, and the politics they’re looking at won’t force them to move,’ ” the former official said, recalling Mr. Obama’s words, and adding, “So the thing we should spend our time talking about is what can you do and what can I do to change the political calculus.” The former official said that the meeting ended with Mr. Obama and the advocates both angry, and the immigration march in Washington went ahead as planned.

Last month, facing renewed pressure, Mr. Obama announced that he had ordered his new secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, to review deportation programs. “When you hear enough stories about separating families or removing people who are not truly dangerous,” Mr. Johnson said, “it leads you to want to dig in to make sure you’re getting the policy and the implementation right.”

Janet Murguia, the president of the National Council of La Raza, the country’s largest Hispanic civil rights organization, joined a growing chorus of unions, religious groups and immigrant advocacy organizations that have labeled Mr. Obama the nation’s “deporter in chief,” and demanded that he make good on his promises to protect immigrant families from unfair removal policies. The pressure has prompted similar calls from leading congressional Democrats, including some of Mr. Obama’s closest allies, who are worried about, among other things, the impact deportations may have on Hispanic turnout in this year’s midterm elections.

After ordering the review, Mr. Obama called the advocates together again. While the White House hoped to intensify pressure on Republicans for comprehensive reform, the advocates had all but given up hope, and have instead directed much of their attention — and outrage — at the administration.

Mr. Obama asked them to skip the stories of pain and suffering, not because he did not care, but because he felt it more productive to discuss strategy for winning permanent relief, people who attended the meeting said.

The odds were not good, Mr. Obama acknowledged. But he asked the advocates to stick with him another 90 days, and press hard on Congress. If those efforts failed to lead to reform, Mr. Obama said he would work with them on administrative relief. The advocates and others told the president that their communities had waited long enough.

“When the president told us he was going to only go after criminal aliens, we all said, ‘OK, go do that, but don’t go after people whose only crime is that they’re living here undocumented,’ ” said Richard Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. who attended the meeting. “But that’s not what happened. Now immigrant communities are feeling under attack. And it’s hard for them to focus on trying to win reform, when they’re afraid they could be pulled over for running a red light, and get torn away from their families.”

By JEREMY W. PETERS and CARL HULSE (New York Times)

WASHINGTON — After months of wincing in the face of negative ads funded by the industrialists David and Charles Koch, Democrats believe they have finally found a way to fight back: attacking the brothers’ sprawling business conglomerate as callous and indifferent to the lives of ordinary people while pursuing profit and power.

By drawing public attention to layoffs by subsidiaries of Koch Industries across the country — a chemical plant in North Carolina, an oil refinery in Alaska, a lumber operation in Arkansas — Democrats are seeking to make villains of the reclusive billionaires, whose political organizations have spent more than $30 million on ads so far to help Republicans win control of the Senate.

The approach should seem familiar. President Obama and his allies ran against Mitt Romney in 2012 by painting a dark picture of Bain Capital, the firm Mr. Romney founded, as a company that cut jobs and prized the bottom line over the well-being of its employees.

Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, has called out the Kochs — whose combined net worth is estimated to be $100 billion — in his latest ads. In one, which features a picture of the brothers grinning, one of them wearing a tuxedo, Alaskans look directly into the camera and unload. “They come into our town, buy our refinery,” says one. “Just running it into the ground,” says another. “A lot of Alaskans are losing jobs, and I’m definitely concerned about the drinking water,” says a young woman holding a baby.

Republicans and other allies of the Kochs say Democrats are wasting their breath and their money. “Their only plausible counter strategy is to try to cast as villains two individual Americans who 95 percent of Americans have never heard of? I think it’s such a stretch,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-aligned organization responsible for most of the ads attacking Democrats.

The stakes for both sides are enormous — including the ability to control the agenda on Capitol Hill on tax legislation, health care and judicial nominations — and the results will drastically affect the final two years of the Obama presidency, and quite likely the 2016 campaign. With the Supreme Court ruling last week that struck down limits on aggregate giving to candidates, spending by wealthy donors will only accelerate.

In North Carolina, Democrats think they have found a way to counter the Kochs at a chemical factory the company owns along the Cape Fear River, where, right before the holidays last year, 100 workers learned they would lose their jobs. Senator Kay Hagan, Democrat of North Carolina, who has been the target of millions of dollars in negative ads from Americans for Prosperity, said the job cuts were a cruel slap to her state, especially since they came right as the group started to spend significant sums attacking her.

“They’re spending millions of dollars to try to buy a United States Senate seat,” she said. “These individuals have actually laid off workers in my state.”

Last week, Charles Koch made a rare public defense of his political and business endeavors, writing in an op-ed article published in The Wall Street Journal, “Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs — even when we benefit from them.”

A spokesman for Koch Industries, Robert A. Tappan, pointed out that Koch companies employ more than 60,000 people and, despite the tough business climate, have 3,500 jobs open. “Koch, like any other business, has to make difficult decisions to ensure the long-term viability of our company,” he said. “The reality is that we have come through a global recession, and growth in the U.S. continues to be sluggish.” (Koch Industries also says that the people in Mr. Begich’s ad are not refinery employees.)

Democrats are hoping to persuade voters that those arguments are hollow. In West Virginia, they lament the loss of 100 jobs in 2010 at a Georgia-Pacific lumber plant in the district of Representative Nick J. Rahall, a senior House Democrat who has been a top target of Americans for Prosperity.

In Arkansas, Democrats criticize the same company, a Koch subsidiary, for eliminating hundreds of mill jobs. They have begun documenting its cuts in two Arkansas towns where Georgia-Pacific, the maker of household products like Quilted Northern toilet paper and Brawny paper towels, laid people off during the economic downturn. Senator Mark Pryor, the Democrat who is up for re-election, has also been pummeled with Americans for Prosperity ads.

Democrats are working hard to draw the Kochs into a more open political battle and help shape the public perception of them as Americans learn more about the money behind the blizzard of midterm advertising. But the battle so far has been asymmetric. Democrats have used their platform as the majority party in the Senate to drive home the Koch attacks, but conservative groups have far outspent Democrats on advertising, helping to weaken the president and his party early on, much as Democrats did to Mr. Romney in 2012.

A recent poll by George Washington University found that 52 percent of registered likely voters had never heard of the brothers. But among the 48 percent who had, more than half had unfavorable views.

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said he found the line of attack unseemly because Democrats appeared to want to punish the brothers for exercising their First Amendment right to political expression. “What I find startling is singling out private American citizens who have decided to engage in the political process, and basically demonizing them by name,” he said. “I think that is something we haven’t seen in quite a while in American politics.”

Alaska, with its robust oil industry, has become an unlikely place for Democrats to test the template they hope to use on the Koch brothers in other states. Mr. Begich has tried to transform the announcement in February that Flint Hills Resources, a Koch Industries company, would stop processing crude oil at its refinery outside Fairbanks, and thus eliminate 81 jobs, into a campaign rallying cry. He has made the brothers the subject of two of his newest ads on radio and television, and condemned them for the commercials that Americans for Prosperity has run.

“Who’s behind the ads?” an announcer asks. “Two billionaire outsiders: the Koch brothers. The same profiteering Koch brothers who bought the Flint Hills refinery in Fairbanks, ran it into the ground and are now shutting it down.”

Democrats hope their attacks, at their most powerful, will have the impact of one of the most memorable ads of 2012, an anti-Romney one in which a worker in Indiana described how he had built a stage for his company after it was acquired by Bain Capital. The stage, he would later learn, was for announcing the closing of his plant. He said it had been like building his own coffin.

Democrats have also been critical of the Kochs with a second line of attack, one with particular resonance in Alaska: accusing them of being outsiders from the lower 48 states meddling in local affairs. An early misstep by Americans for Prosperity gave the Begich campaign an opening to try to discredit the Kochs as interloping mudslingers, criticisms it has increased lately.

In a commercial for the Koch-backed group that aired late last year, an actress standing in a high-end, French country-style kitchen slams Mr. Begich as not listening to Alaskans.

It ended up giving Mr. Begich his opportunity to go after the Kochs. “First you use an actress to misrepresent my views. Now you’re firing Alaskans. You’re leaving dirty water. And the Republican governor is suing you,” the senator said in an interview. “These guys don’t care. They’re abandoning Alaska. They’re leaving.”

The Kochs’ business interests in Alaska have only become more tangled up in local politics since the state, led by Gov. Sean Parnell, a Republican, announced that it was suing Flint Hills Resources because of pollution at the refinery site. In shutting down, the company cited “the burden of excessive costs” related to the cleanup of contaminated soil and groundwater, which it says occurred under previous owners.

Most Republicans seem content to let Democrats keep swinging at the Kochs, saying the efforts will squander energy and resources that could have been spent elsewhere.

“Mitt Romney was the candidate for president of the United States,” said Mr. Phillips, the Americans for Prosperity president, explaining that voters would not punish the Kochs the same way they did Mr. Romney.

“That’s a big difference. David Koch is the chairman of our foundation. He’s not running for anything,” Mr. Phillips added. “This just points to what bad shape they’re in.”

It is shocking but true that now the Super Rat Packs can buy US Elections as decided today (The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled in McCutcheon v. FEC that aggregate contribution limits are not constitutional). Didn’t some from the party promise to look at this whole issue after the 2012 Presidential Elections? We all heard speeches to that effect during the 2012 Presidential re-election campaign. What happened?

By Paul Whitefield (LA Times)

No, Paul Ryan isn’t Ebenezer Scrooge. But give him time; he’s young. And he shows such promise.

On Tuesday, Ryan, the Republican tax-hatchet-man from Wisconsin, unveiled a new spending blueprint. Got a catchy title too: “The Path to Prosperity.” Its modest goal? To balance the budget in 10 years.

Wow, you say, that must be hard to do.

No, not really. Not if you’re as smart — and coldhearted — as Ryan.

But look, I know you’re busy. It’s a Twitter world. So rather than make you slog through the pages and pages of Ryan’s plan, I’ve boiled it down. It really has just two basic premises:

Screw all the poor people.

Help rich people get richer.

Welcome to Ryan’s America. If you know your history, you might recognize it. It’s the Roaring ’20s, redux. Or “The Great Gatsby” meets “Wall Street.” Because in Ryan’s America, greed really is good.

How so? Well, in a nutshell, here’s Ryan and the Republicans’ vision, per my colleague, Lisa Mascaro:

“House Republicans will return to the core ideas from Ryan, the Budget Committee chairman, that have come to define the party’s approach: Cut federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid and other programs that make up the federal safety net, while reducing top individual and corporate tax rates to 25%, which Republicans argue will spur economic growth.”

Holy Ronald Reagan! The Gipper may be gone, but his trickle-down economic notions are alive and well.

As is his love of guns but not butter: Ryan’s budget will target the poor but not the military; it proposes to cut food stamps but beef up the Pentagon’s budget. (Geez, do Republicans all own stock in defense contractors?)

Anyway, if you’re behind Door No. 2, in Ryan’s world, you’re gold — and his goal is to help you become more golden. After all, you’re a “maker.”

But, if you’re behind Door No. 1 — also known as “the 8-ball” — things are, well, less promising.

You see, in the Republicans’ world, the poor — affectionately known as “takers” or, to Mitt Romney, the 47% who rely on the government and so didn’t have the good sense to vote for him because he was a nice guy even though no, he didn’t have any use for them but still would’ve been happy and proud to be their president — should either get busy working or get busy dying.

Yes, Ryan and the Republicans have discovered that America’s biggest problem is, well, the American people. Or rather, the poor, the old and the sick American people. Or the ones who just aren’t working.

They are, quite frankly, costing us way too much money. They are why the budget isn’t balanced. So if we can just quit spending so much money on them, voila!: problem solved. Plus we can buy more aircraft carriers and wage more wars! It’s a win-win.

But, well, uh, doesn’t this whole concept seem just a little bit, oh, what’s the word: cruel?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. But if the road to a balanced budget means building a new freeway to the poor house for many Americans; if it means a bigger military but more hungry kids; if it means chopping healthcare so Sheldon Adelson can keep more of his millions, so he can spend those millions to buy more politicians — well, that just doesn’t seem like a road worth taking.

If that’s America’s Path to Prosperity, then stop the car, I want to get out.