Obama’s bite-size initiatives reminiscent of Clinton reelection

From The Washington Post:

The series of economic initiatives announced by President Obama in recent days reflects a strategic and tactical shift that White House officials hope will guide the president’s governing and political agenda in the months ahead.

The new effort, carried out through unilateral executive actions, was agreed upon weeks ago and is strongly reminiscent of a successful campaign deployed by Bill Clinton in the run-up to his 1996 reelection.

Almost every day this week, Obama rolled out a program aimed at some troubled sector of the economy: mortgage relief for homeowners Monday, tax credits to spur job growth for veterans Tuesday, college loan relief for students Wednesday, regulatory and information shortcuts for small businesses Friday.

The plan-a-day strategy is an approach designed to portray Obama as decisive as the White House complains about Congress’s failure to pass his jobs bill. Senior administration aides said they expected the effort to continue as long as Congress balks at his proposals.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) predicted that the president’s effort will fail, saying that the economy will need more help to recover than can be accomplished through unilateral White House action.

“If the president wants to put people back to work, he’s going to have to engage in the legislative process and work with us to find common ground. It’s that simple,” Boehner said. A Boehner aide said the speaker had not been notified in advance about the executive actions.

In Clinton’s case, the initiatives were derided for being small — “McIssues” — and for pandering to the political center. Yet they worked, helping him overcome the doubts about his presidency raised by the sweeping Republican victory in the 1994 midterm election.

Nancy-Ann DeParle, the deputy chief of staff for policy, is leading the effort to find polices that do not require congressional approval, aides said. Bruce Reed, who is chief of staff to Vice President Biden, White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler and Stephanie Cutter, a top adviser, were other early participants.

White House officials said Obama is not abandoning large ambitions in favor of smaller ones or becoming, as Clinton was sometimes known, an “incremental president.” Obama is still pressing for his $447 billion jobs package, they said.

But the Obama White House is beginning to deploy the technocratic skill that Clinton became famous for, and the imprint of the Clinton veterans on Obama’s staff members is apparent. At least two of them — including Reed, who was director of Clinton’s Domestic Policy Council — helped guide Clinton’s incremental successes more than a decade ago.

The bite-size initiatives — although the White House hates that term — are helping solve an inherent problem with Obama’s reelection campaign: With the economy in crisis, the president is not in a position to talk about his sweeping plans for a second term.

Obama has barely mentioned a second term, except to say, as he did on the road this week, that he has fulfilled 60 percent of his 2008 campaign promises and will “get the other 40 percent done in the next five years.”

Obama is expected to press forward on immigration if he wins reelection. Some other potential priorities — such as making changes to Social Security and Medicare, pursuing peace in the Middle East or perhaps endorsing gay marriage — would be politically risky for him to discuss in an election season.