As focus turns to economy, health care appears to be on White House back burner

Three months ago, at a private meeting of nervous House Democratic lawmakers, President Obama promised to put the full weight of his office behind the marketing of the health-care bill once it became law.

"We've spent so much time talking about the House bill versus the Senate bill that we haven't been able to talk about how great the bill is overall. Once we have a final bill, we can really talk about how it's going to help Americans," Obama said at the time.

But since April 1, the subject has hardly escaped his lips publicly, and it looks like the entire month of April might go by without a presidential event focused on health care.

The White House announced Tuesday that his next swing through Main Street America -- a trip to Iowa, Missouri and Illinois next week -- will focus on jobs and the economy as Obama meets with small-business owners and farmers.

There was no mention of health care in the announcement.

That has been the case for weeks, as the president has turned his attention to nuclear proliferation and the Democratic effort to pass financial regulatory reform, two subjects that had been percolating in the background for months.

A White House official said Tuesday that the president intends to be actively involved in promoting the benefits of the new law.

"He believes it was a good bill, that it's going to help a lot of families and small businesses," the aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy and planning. "He's proud of it and he's going to be touting it."

In the meantime, the official pointed to under-the-radar efforts to get the word out by others in the Obama administration. For example, the IRS sent out postcards Monday to millions of small-business owners, informing them of tax credits they might receive to provide health-care benefits to their employees.

The White House office that coordinates regional media outlets spent much of the day Monday making sure that reporters around the country had information about that effort, the official said.

At a Senate Democratic luncheon last week, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told senators that the White House is close to hiring what he called a "very senior official" to help coordinate the administration's health-care message leading into the fall elections.

Back in March, just days before the bill's passage, Obama offered some simple messaging advice to lawmakers: "This is a Patient's Bill of Rights on steroids," he said. Presumably, the administration's new point person will help implement the president's pledge to help turn the health-care vote into an asset.

That can't come soon enough for many Democratic lawmakers, who are eager to communicate the law's benefits to their constituents in the face of an ongoing barrage of criticism of it from their challengers and tea party activists.

The worry is that the White House could wait too long to start that process, essentially repeating the same mistake that many Democrats believe they made early in the health-care fight, by ceding control over the message to their opponents.

Just Tuesday, for example, the Republican National Committee argued to reporters that the health-care law will "squeeze care providers, hit job creators, and penalize the uninsured."

But at least some of the president's allies are willing to wait a little while longer.

Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now, a coalition that formed to fight for the president's legislation, said the past several weeks have been a time for organizing and regrouping.

"He's got a full agenda. He's doing arms control. He's taking on Wall Street and a host of other issues," Rome said. "We've been very pleased with his advocacy of health care."