President Barack Obama, after weeks of private talks, is putting the finishing touches on a new election-year strategy that replaces sweeping "change" with incremental reform, according to senior White House officials.
“Reform is the new change,” a senior aide told POLITICO.
The revamped 2010 plan focuses extensively on new reform efforts, starting with a “competitiveness” push, a call for tighter campaign finance laws and renewed attention to Obama’s open-government agenda.
The strategy involves heavy use of presidential statements and Obama's White House platform to position him as an agent of popular change, with less reliance on a complicated legislative agenda. It represents a downsizing from the heady days just a year ago when he hoped to rack up legislative achievements of a scope not seen since the Great Society triumphs of President Lyndon Johnson.
It acknowledges implicitly something Obama aides make explicit in background conversations: The president is unlikely to pass the most expansive parts of his agenda this year and is too tied in public perceptions to a messy legislative process and unpopular congressional leaders.
Presidential aides say they recognize that there’s not enough time before the 2010 elections to transform the toxic political environment that has given Republicans a real, albeit remote, chance of winning control of the House or Senate. Instead, the White House is going to try to mitigate the damage by reminding voters, especially independents, of the reasons they voted so eagerly for Obama in 2008.
The strategy, detailed here for the first time, is the culmination of weeks of internal deliberations over how to reposition Obama and congressional Democrats for the midterm congressional elections in November.
A close adviser said Obama plans to increase his travel in the country, including minicampaigns built around “a series of small but highly visible policy debates that clearly put the Democrats on the side of middle-class families, with lobbies for special interests on the other side.” Two likely targets: student-loan servicing organizations and banks.
A top administration official said that “the biggest piece of reform” will be supporting congressional efforts to limit the impact of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that opened campaigns to huge independent spending by corporations and unions. “Americans really turned against this opinion, the official said. “And so the biggest reform is to ensure that our politics and our campaigns are not controlled by special interests. Getting legislation that deals with the Supreme Court decision on the floor and debated — and hopefully passed — is very important.”
Senior Capitol Hill aides tell POLITICO that both the House and the Senate plan to take up such measures in coming weeks. Lawmakers and the White House were emboldened by a Washington Post-ABC News poll finding 80 percent or respondents opposed to the court decision. A top Senate Democratic official said Democrats are planning to take up legislation in response to the Citizens United ruling by Easter in order to have something on the books before the 2010 elections.
The administration official said that another key theme in coming days, in addition to reform, will be “how to make America competitive, because our competitors are not playing for second place.”
“That’s the banner,” the official said. “Whether it’s education, whether it’s jobs, whether it’s research and development, whether it’s nuclear power: It’s all about America’s competitiveness.”
The emphasis on competitiveness addresses voter feelings that government is out of control, and underscores that Obama is a capitalist, using the private sector to boost jobs. “The White House recognizes a growing anxiety about America’s ability to compete with China and India over the long run if we don’t address problems in education, innovation, energy — all areas where Republican obstruction is preventing progress,” a White House official said.
Aides say Obama will stress that theme at all three of his major public events this week: On Monday, he speaks to the nation’s governors at the White House. On Wednesday, he travels to the St. Regis Hotel to address the CEOs who make up Business Roundtable. And on Thursday, he holds his bipartisan health-care summit at Blair House.
Finally, in an effort to reclaim the “change” mantle even though he now runs the government, Obama plans to emphasize his “transparency” agenda — such measures as releasing White House visitor logs; posting specific projects funded by the stimulus bill; and signing an Open Government Directive requiring federal agencies to achieve milestones in transparency, participation and collaboration. “It gives the American people a very important sense that they have influence and control, and access to information,” the administration official said.
Steve Hildebrand, deputy manager of Obama’s presidential campaign and now a political consultant specializing in grass-roots strategy, has been reminding the White House that the politics of reform are more attractive than ever after the high court’s Citizens United decision, which found that independent corporate spending in elections constituted free speech and therefore could not be banned by the government.
Hildebrand has been bolstering his case with research from a joint project by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and Mark McKinnon, a top adviser to former President George W. Bush. “Voters, particularly independents,” the pollsters concluded, “strongly embrace the Fair Elections Now Act, a system that allows candidates who eschew contributions over $100 to receive public matching funds for money they raise from individuals in their own state. Voters support the Fair Elections Now Act by a two-to-one margin.”
Hildebrand, who is working as a consultant to Public Campaign Action Fund and Common Cause to help pass serious campaign finance reform, contends that in a close race this fall, the candidate identified as the reformer will win “hands down.”
“A reformer can be a Republican or a Democrat — it’s not going to matter,” Hildebrand said. “Reform is going to trump partisanship, in my opinion. If somebody tries to campaign on change this fall, it’ll fall short unless that change is around some real serious reform.”
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