President Obama will begin pushing for a one-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for Americans making less than $250,000, reports the New York Times. The announcement from the Rose Garden Monday will signal the president’s emphasis on tax fairness as a major issue just four months from the election. Pushing the issue is also meant to make House Republicans look unreasonable as they move this month to vote on a full, permanent extension of all of the Bush tax cuts.

But a letter signed by all 42 members of the Senate GOP conference threatened to block action on other legislative items until a deal on the expiring Bush era tax cuts is reached. Such time-consuming negotiations could eat up the remaining time to take care of "Don't ask, don't tell" during the lame-duck, which is expected to end by mid-December.

Supporters of repeal received a boost Tuesday when Defense Secretary Robert Gates called on the Senate to repeal the policy after the Pentagon released a study showing that allowing gays to openly serve would cause no long-term disruptions in the military.

Now, I know there are some who would have preferred a protracted political fight, even if it had meant higher taxes for all Americans, even if it had meant an end to unemployment insurance for those who are desperately looking for work.

And I understand the desire for a fight. I'm sympathetic to that. I'm as opposed to the high-end tax cuts today as I've been for years. In the long run, we simply can't afford them. And when they expire in two years, I will fight to end them, just as I suspect the Republican Party may fight to end the middle-class tax cuts that I've championed and that they've opposed.

The president’s proposal could also put him at odds with Democratic leaders like Representative Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who have advocated extending the cuts for everyone who earns up to $1 million. And it will most likely do little to break the deadlock in Washington over how to deal with fiscal deficits, an impasse that has only hardened as Republicans sense a chance to make gains in Congress this fall.

But by calling for an extension for just a year, Mr. Obama hopes to make Republicans look obstructionist and unreasonable. Trying to bounce back from another weak jobs report on Friday, he also hopes to deepen the contrast with his challenger, Mitt Romney. On Friday, the president said Mr. Romney would “give $5 trillion of new tax cuts on top of the Bush tax cuts, most of them going to the wealthiest Americans.”

Administration officials said they did not believe that the difference between the White House and these Democratic leaders was a big obstacle. They said that whether to use $250,000 or $1 million as a cutoff was more a matter of strategy than a “religious debate,” in the words of one official, who added that many other Democrats favored $250,000.

the president would not support giving rich people another tax break. “Let’s make some progress on our spending by doing away with tax cuts for people who quite frankly don’t need them – tax cuts that haven’t worked,” Gibbs said during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union. Obama is “100% committed” to that position, he insisted.

“What we ought to be doing is extend the current tax rates for another year, {..} to do otherwise would make the economy worse.”

President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation's thorniest fiscal challenges.

The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush's tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans' incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush's father.