By Steve Holland and Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House, while advancing an aggressive public relations campaign to highlight the damaging effects of $85 billion in automatic spending cuts, is largely resigned to the fact that they will go into effect on Friday.

With no deal expected in the few days remaining until the cuts kick in, President Barack Obama is pursuing a strategy aimed at generating outrage among Americans that he hopes will force Republicans to come to the negotiating table and agree to his demand for higher taxes after the cuts go into place.

The White House is well aware that Republicans need a victory for their conservative supporters after they reluctantly agreed to income tax increases for the wealthy at the end of last year.

Officials reason that standing up to the president now and ushering in across-the-board spending cuts, no matter how onerous, would allow Republicans to show the conservative Tea Party movement and other right-leaning supporters that they were not steamrolled into raising tax revenues again.

Once that "victory" is achieved and the cuts go into effect on March 1, officials hope real talks can begin in earnest to turn them off and agree on a wider deal.

"I think it's put Republicans on notice that if they don't act, they're going to own this, pure and simple," said Democratic strategist Bud Jackson.

It is the latest step in yet another Washington budget showdown as Obama seeks to use the political clout he feels he earned by winning re-election in November to push forward proposals aimed at improving the plight of the middle class.

The president has an aggressive agenda that includes tighter gun control measures and an immigration overhaul, but he must deal first with a budget morass that was partly of his own making.

The White House and Republicans in 2011 came up with the idea for the automatic spending cuts, known as the "sequester," designing them to be so draconian that no one would ever let them take place.

Now that they are about to become a reality, top government officials have warned of dire results such as long security lines at airports and insufficiently guarded borders as a way of preparing Americans for what to expect and, more strategically, to encourage them to complain to their lawmakers in Congress.

The White House says it has little flexibility in determining where the cuts will take place, rejecting claims from Republicans that the president could make trims that would be less economically damaging. "You can't change the fact that the impact will be heavy," said White House spokesman Jay Carney.

The risk of this strategy, experts say, is that the public may not perceive the cuts to be as bad as advertised and fails to get outraged.

"It's a legitimate tactic," said David Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University. "The danger is if the sequester goes into effect and the sky doesn't fall, people will say we're getting along fine." Continued...