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.
“We developed a process by necessity in the wake of the ’94 elections where we had to spend a lot more time focusing on executive actions,” Reed told the New York Times in 1997. Gene Sperling, who served as director of the National Economic Council in the Clinton White House and is in that role again now, said at the time that Clinton had developed a “broader way of thinking about the presidency, not just what you can do legislatively.”
After months of conflict, White House officials sounded relieved to be discussing action on the part of the president. “The president has dramatically shifted the terms of the debate in Washington to jobs and specifically his jobs plan,” said White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer. “So much so that House Republicans are now tripping over each other to talk about parts of the president’s plan they’ve tried to pass.”
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.
Axelrod disputed that Republicans have an advantage by being able to turn voters’ attention to a bigger agenda than the one being laid out by Obama.
“Those guys are talking about what they would do on Day One, but all they’re saying is that they would repeal everything he’s done,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot of visionary talk over there.”
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