Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and a loudly ticking clock aren’t explicitly mentioned in an internal White House memo mapping out President Barack Obama’s plan for 2016. But they’re defining it.
The very calendar-conscious memo, according to White House aides, leans heavily on using the “conversations” that have defined Obama’s recent media approach to push his own agenda. But he’ll also use them to subtly, then not-so-subtly, make the case for the Democratic nominee, whom Obama and everyone else in the White House assume (but won’t yet say out loud) will be Clinton.
On Friday, Obama will use his annual year-end press conference to take a victory lap after what he and his aides gloat was an expectation-defying 2015, but also lay the groundwork for an eighth year that they insist will be different from any other.
Acknowledging privately that he flubbed his initial response to the Paris attacks, Obama’s are hoping to add more theater to his counterterrorism response. The actual strategy isn’t changing much. But with White House aides saying they feel like Americans are more worried about the immediate threat of terrorism in the wake of Paris and San Bernadino than at any point since 9/11, there will be more events like Obama’s visits to the Pentagon and the National Counterterrorism Center this week — meetings that would likely be happening anyway, but deliberately pushed into public view, with the president making sure to speak more passionately himself.
And long before Obama officially starts campaigning for Clinton, he’ll be doing more speeches like his recent ones about immigration: rebutting without directly mentioning whatever flares up from Trump or the other Republicans. As the Republicans ramp up, so will he: he’d prepared to keep knocking their attention grabbing policies as unintelligent and un-American, and not what he, or most people, or the Democratic candidate for president would want.
“He’s obviously an observer of what’s happening, and certainly he has taken in with concern some of the drive to the right of the rhetoric on the Republican side,” said White House communications director Jen Psaki.
Obama’s final State of the Union – scheduled for Jan. 12, many weeks ahead of last year’s carefully plotted address — was purposefully designed to get out ahead of the presidential candidates.
A senior administration official promised reporters Thursday afternoon that the speech would be “non-traditional,” but then clarified that it would still be a speech in front of Congress, just without “a huge long list from the president of legislative to-dos.”
“We made a conscious decision to do the State of the Union early this year because it allows the president to kick off the year with a frame for what is ahead,” said Psaki, who has spent the last month crafting the plan along with deputy chiefs of staff Anita Decker Breckenridge and Kristie Canegallo, senior adviser Shailagh Murray and chief digital officer Jason Goldman.
Heading out around the country for one-off speeches and events like factory tours—out. Expecting much more out of Congress than a criminal justice reform deal, which White House aides cautiously say House Speaker Paul Ryan has expressed openness to, and finally voting up the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal—over.
Instead, aides say the president will focus on expanding Obamacare and climate change efforts. Obama will push states to expand Medicaid, talking drug prices and precision medicine, and, with drawn-out approval timelines in mind, rolling out a new set of environmental regulations early in the year.
“A thousand flowers cannot bloom. We have a limited time left, and we need to prioritize the most important things,” explained one White House aide. “We do not have an unlimited amount of time for the president. We need to use his time strategically and look for big moments, either to move a policy forward or to use the bully pulpit to raise an issue and elevate it or do something that’s high risk, but high reward.”
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SOURCE: EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
Politico
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