The biggest difference in this new phase of Barack Obama’s presidency: he’s not so needy.
During 2009-10, President Obama needed a lot from Congress: a $787 billion stimulus package to counter the economic crisis, a financial regulation overhaul to prevent the next one and big health care and energy programs to fulfill his vision for future growth.
Now, by circumstance and by choice, he doesn’t.
Doug Mills/The New York Times President Obama is taking his economic message to cities across the country.The new Republican House won’t give Mr. Obama what he wants on issues like energy or immigration, anyway. And if he fails to win scaled-back versions of his priorities, his aides can blame a divided Congress more easily than a Democratic one, they figure.
The only thing Mr. Obama truly needs — a spending deal to keep the government running — is as important to Republicans as to the White House. If that limits Mr. Obama’s policy horizons, it also liberates him from the vote-wheedling that sometimes undercut his pledge to change Washington.
Instead, the president and his aides are pursuing education, energy and economic goals through methods over which they have more control: trade promotion, other executive and regulatory authority, and use of the bully pulpit.
“They have a new orientation,” said John Podesta, who directed Mr. Obama’s presidential transition and remains close to top White House officials. “It’s less about talking back to Congress, and more about getting stuff done.”
Whether it will work, as a matter of substance or politics, remains an open question.
The Rhythms of Office
In large part, Mr. Obama is accommodating the tidal rhythms that buffet every president. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, too, saw their partisan and ideological waves crest soon after taking office, then recede after midterm election setbacks.
Presidents Reagan and Clinton navigated those shifts without losing the ability to advance their goals — or win re-election. Jimmy Carter and the first President George Bush couldn’t.
The most visible White House adjustment is the effort to communicate more coherently about the public’s dominant concerns: economic recovery.
That means traveling more consistently to carry his message of “winning the future” outside Washington — to Cleveland, Miami and Boston in the last three weeks.
It means providing access to the president more selectively. “He’s done a bit more regional and local level” media interviews instead of national ones, said Martha Joynt Kumar, a scholar who tracks presidential communication.
And it means, as much as possible, repeating the president’s State of the Union exhortation for students, teachers, scientists and business executives to “out-innovate, outeducate and outbuild the rest of the world.”
Aides for previous presidents call it a sensible adjustment to reduced clout on Capitol Hill. “Hammering home megathemes that are important to people outside Washington,” said Dan Bartlett, communications director to President George W. Bush, “is a good communications strategy.”
But Mr. Bartlett cautioned that “they’re not going to see the needle moving” on public opinion unless they stick with their strategy for months. A fractured, frenetic news media environment makes patience more difficult.
So do events that presidents can’t control, like unrest across the Middle East and an accompanying rise in gas prices for American consumers. Even with unemployment falling to 8.9 percent last month, polls show those events have eroded some of Mr. Obama’s gains since the midterm elections.
Shifting the Tone
Last week, Mr. Obama used his bully pulpit on an unconventional issue reminiscent of how Mr. Clinton promoted uniforms for schoolchildren and anticrime neighborhood watch groups. He hosted a White House event on preventing bullying in schools and elsewhere.
Some conservatives grumbled. But Mr. Obama’s aides watched the Internet hits pile up via Facebook and child-rearing Web sites and counted it a success in breaking through to average Americans.
“It takes them completely out of the treacherous and poisonous Washington partisanship, and he gets to be president of all the people,” said Mr. Podesta, who served as Mr. Clinton’s White House chief of staff. “Michele Bachmann may make fun of him, but who cares?”
Democrats care more about the president’s aloofness from their budget battles with Republicans on Capitol Hill. Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia publicly blistered Mr. Obama last week for having “failed to lead.”
Sometimes the president’s posture has been notable for its audacity. He chided Congressional Democrats last week for having insisted on their “100 percent maximal position” in budget negotiations — when what they insisted on was actually the administration’s position.
Obama aides calculate that distance now will enhance the president’s ability to shape a compromise later. “Don’t play every card until you have to play it,” agreed Mike McCurry, Mr. Clinton’s onetime press secretary.
But White House officials also know that Mr. Obama’s success will turn far more on the robustness of economic recovery than on how they talk about it.
“If you don’t have the substance,” Mr. Podesta said, “the communication won’t work.”