Many Democrats say Obama is getting the party back to where it should be. Obama turns left

President Barack Obama wants to sound like a different kind of Democrat.

He’s connecting to progressive populism with an aggressive, spending-oriented, activist government approach to the economy personified by Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio. Obama’s already backed raising the minimum wage, the start of what White House officials say will be a 2014 domestic agenda — including his State of the Union address and budget — that centers around income inequality and what the government is doing to increase economic mobility.


That means changing how he talks about some familiar items, including the Affordable Care Act and the universal pre-kindergarten plan from his 2013 State of the Union, as well as pitching an array of new proposals flowing from this new emphasis.

The State of the Union address is scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 28, the White House said Friday.

Obama needs his base invested to help him recover from his low poll numbers and give his party a platform as Democrats try to make the House competitive and hold onto to their majority in the Senate. And those in the coalition that won Obama two elections — young people, African-Americans, Latinos, single women and immigrants — are precisely the ones hit hardest by the doldrum economy.

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The Dow keeps breaking records while unemployment’s still at 7 percent. Bankers are getting bigger bonuses while a Bloomberg News poll Wednesday showed 64 percent of people saying America no longer offers an equal shot. Angry voters have elected the tea party, and they’ve elected de Blasio mayor of New York, put Warren in her Senate seat and Ted Cruz in his. People who’ve watched Obama and recent election results closely say there is a danger of the country — and the Democratic Party — getting past him.

The president has been paying attention to the kind of response generated by Warren and de Blasio, the latter one of several new mayors meeting with Obama at the White House on Friday.

“He senses the same thing they do,” said a White House official.

Last week, Obama warned of “a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain,” adding, “I am convinced that the decisions we make on these issues over the next few years will determine whether or not our children will grow up in an America where opportunity is real.”

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Many Democrats in Congress say Obama is getting the party back to where it should have been.

“The guy running for mayor in New York made this a big theme, and he won, so I think it makes sense to focus on it,” said Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), who’s running for reelection next year. “This is a time to be talking about these kinds of things. I’m going to be talking about them.”

The White House shift has already been felt. Larry Summers withdrew from consideration to be the new Federal Reserve chairman, with Janet Yellen getting the job instead. John Podesta’s hiring as the new senior counselor to the president has liberals thinking they have a man on the inside to push an economic progressive agenda. And Obama successfully lobbied Democratic senators to change the filibuster rules that were holding up his executive branch and judicial nominees.

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The left is also pointing to Sherrod Brown’s reelection in Ohio and Tammy Baldwin’s win in Wisconsin as evidence of the broad reach of their government-spending, Wall Street-restraining argument, along with their own polls showing support in swing states for ideas like expanding Social Security and cutting corporate subsidies, and independent polls that show broad bipartisan support for raising the minimum wage.

There’s debate over what polls about ideals without explanations for how to pay for them actually prove, but White House focus groups reflect that the strong support for the minimum wage has a lot to do with why the president kicked off his new agenda by embracing an increase.

Obama used a December 2011 speech in Osawatomie, Kan., to set a tone for his reelection, and his argument to raise taxes to pay for more spending was central to the campaign. But that’s dissipated over the course of the following year.

“The president’s right now where he should have been coming out of the presidential election, because he was that way going into the presidential election,” said Brown, who said he has had preliminary conversations with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough about policy ideas for the State of the Union.

White House officials wouldn’t comment on those discussions, though they say the topic regularly comes up in conversation with leading Hill Democrats, and they expect the pace and focus to pick up in the weeks ahead.

“This is a broadly occurring thing, and obviously it will occur in different ways in different places, and at different speeds in different places,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), one of de Blasio’s key supporters at home and a long-time opponent of the national party’s spending-cut mentality. “The progressive economics is the popular economics. It’s less repressed now because of the atmosphere.”

White House and Democratic officials say they’re confident they’ll avoid the depth of internal warfare that’s torn apart the GOP as the tea party pulled moderate Republicans to the right. But moderate Democrats worry a progressive shift could sink the party in any place less liberal than Massachusetts and New York City.

Asked about Obama’s new turn to economic progressivism, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) — the standard-bearer of his party’s fiscal moderates — said, “I still think that one of the single biggest things we could do to generate job growth would be a grand bargain.”

Republicans say they’re not worried about the new approach from Obama. However much the president may try to tap into a new populism, said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), he won’t be able to change next year’s elections from being litigated on his own record and the health care law.

“When your premiums double, and your co-pay goes through the roof, the minimum wage is probably not going to resonate with you,” Graham said. “Trying to change the subject to a populist agenda does nothing but reinforce the lack of leadership.”

Progressives feel they’ve heard the promises before, watched the president keep pushing for a grand bargain, and hungered for his administration to invite fewer bankers to the White House and put more of them on trial.

“People have a lot of passion about a lot of these issues, and a lot pent up because Obama hasn’t necessarily driven that passion,” said Mike Lux, a progressive political consultant who served on Obama’s transition team. “People need those kinds of tangible things that happen. They need something to satisfy that sense that the rich and powerful are getting away with murder and no one’s stopping them from doing it.”

As a start, the Congressional Progressive Caucus is pushing the president to sign an executive order raising the minimum wage on federal contractors — in part leading by example, in part immediately boosting salaries for more people than work at McDonald’s and Wal-Mart combined. White House press secretary Jay Carney wouldn’t comment directly on the proposal last week, saying the president’s focus remains on congressional action.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), CPC’s co-chairman, says the first trips on an Obama road tour should be in front of the top 15 infrastructure projects in most desperate need of attention. Give up on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal talks, Ellison said, and insist that any tax reform bill come with enough closed loopholes to be revenue-positive.

“Until he says stuff like that, we’ve got a problem,” Ellison said, who noted that he felt the president’s income inequality speech was “awesome.”

Ellison knows that’s asking for a significant change from the president — but a necessary one.

“It’s tough to align a political vision with political action,” Ellison said. “To say we should go through Congress is like saying we should get Stevie Wonder to drive himself to the studio.”

In their “Economic Populism Is a Dead End for Democrats” Wall Street Journal op-ed, leaders of the Third Way centrist Democratic think tank caused an internal party explosion by saying having de Blasio and Warren as a “guiding star” nationally would be disastrous. But Third Way vice president Matt Bennett says the op-ed was really about opposing a run toward Social Security expansion, which he called bad politics and bad policy because there’s no clear way to pay for it.

Based on the income inequality speech, Bennett said Obama appears to be hitting the right balance and tone.

“What Obama understands is that anger is not enough in American politics. It can win you primaries. It can win you occasional general elections,” Bennett said. “But as a national political strategy, it is not enough.”

Progressives sense opportunity — for Obama, for them and for the Democratic Party, but only if the president actually follows through before the focus shifts beyond him, to 2016.

“He has a year and a half to define the party. Ideally, he should start talking more about a clear and strong progressive vision — while doing what he can through executive actions — then we win a majority in 2014, then we have two years,” Nadler said. “And that’s his legacy.”