The local strategy is unusually aggressive, even for a president on the ropes. | REUTERS Local media targeted on Obamacare

President Barack Obama has bungled HealthCare.gov so badly that he’s told senior aides to not even try to win positive coverage from the national press.

Instead, they’re going local.


In the past month, Obama and his Cabinet have hit nine of the top 10 cities with the highest concentration of the uninsured, while senior administration officials have held almost daily reporter conference calls in nearly a dozen states to challenge Republican governors who refuse to expand Medicaid.

Obama’s political arm, Organizing for Action, is taking a similar approach, holding protests — some attended by only a dozen or so people — that win coverage on the local pages of the nation’s small-town newspapers.

( PHOTOS: 12 Democrats criticizing the Obamacare rollout)

The local strategy is unusually aggressive, even for a president on the ropes and desperate to circumvent the national media. It’s been the only way to break through the glut of bad headlines and go on the offense to make the law work — although even when the White House showers attention on small markets, the results can be mixed.

The effort mirrors how Obama’s presidential campaigns operated. Pay special attention to local press because that’s where far more people who Obama wants to target get their news.

Josh Earnest, the principal deputy White House press secretary, got top billing in front page stories last week in The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg, S.C., The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., and the Portland Press Herald in Maine — offering the same talking points that the administration repeats daily in Washington without much notice.

And while the White House briefing room is dominated by national news outlets, just behind the door where the communications staff works is a wall covered with reproductions of front pages of local newspapers. Stories about Obama’s initiatives are outlined with yellow highlighter.

( Understanding Obamacare: POLITICO’s guide to the ACA)

Obama, thin-skinned about media coverage of his presidency and often frustrated by the White House press corps, knows a few favorable local headlines is as good as it gets these days. He made a rare public admission during his Nov. 14 press conference that his aides found strikingly candid for the image-conscious president: The media have been justifiably hard on him.

“Right now, everybody is properly focused on us not doing a good job on the rollout, and that’s legitimate and I get it,” Obama said, repeating a sentiment he’s delivered privately to top aides. “There have been times where I thought we were kind of slapped around a little bit unjustly. This one is deserved. Right? It’s on us.”

The centerpiece of the local strategy is the White House’s campaign against Republican governors or legislatures in 24 states that have declined to accept federal money to open up Medicaid to 5.4 million people. With a faulty website, the White House has lost much of the high ground to push back on Obamacare attacks over the past two months, but the one exception is the GOP resistance to expand Medicaid access, said a senior administration official.

( PHOTOS: House hearing on Obamacare website)

Republicans have made a big deal of the canceled policies on the individual market, the official said, but the GOP is responsible for leaving millions of Americans in limbo. This population earns too much to sign up for Medicaid and too little to qualify for tax subsidies to purchase private insurance in the exchanges.

On the local media calls, administration officials quantify the impact state by state. In Nebraska, for example, the White House targeted Republican Gov. Dave Heineman, saying his refusal to expand Medicaid leaves 48,000 residents without access to affordable coverage.

( Also on POLITICO: It's not Obamacare, it's business)

“They can score short-term political points by attacking the Affordable Care Act and blocking Medicaid expansion,” Earnest told Nebraska media last week. “Or on the other hand, they can actually save taxpayer dollars and ensure that thousands of their residents … would have access to quality, affordable health care.”

The Omaha World-Herald put the story on A6 under the headline: “Nebraska takes heat for not expanding Medicaid.”

But flip to the front of the business page in the same edition, and the news is less favorable for the White House: “Midlands employers expect jump in 2014 health costs.” The story details how Nebraska and Iowa employers are bracing for benefit cost increases that exceed the national average, due in part to the Affordable Care Act, according to the survey of employers.

The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg, S.C., stripped two stories across its front page last week — one was about canceled insurance policies, but the other focused on the White House demanding Republican Gov. Nikki Haley to open up Medicaid.

Visits by Cabinet officials to Atlanta, Tampa and Detroit, among other cities, generated stories that mostly played it straight, relaying their pleas to give Obamacare a chance and their calls for governors to expand Medicaid access.

Tougher coverage has followed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on her trips to Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Texas and Florida. One headline in the Miami Herald last week: “In Miami, health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admits testing of Obamacare website ‘not sufficient.’”

Sebelius will host a conference call Tuesday with state and local officials to promote Obamacare enrollment, push for the Medicaid expansion and offer suggestions on outreach, a White House official said.

The White House effort gives local reporters and outlets an angle that’s not what is coming from the Washington-based national political class or wire services focused on the HealthCare.gov rollout.

But the timing isn’t ideal for allies fighting for Medicaid expansion in state capitals.

The legislatures in all of the states in which the White House held calls last week are dark until at least January. Unlike in Washington, there are defined political seasons in places like Augusta, Maine, and Columbia, S.C., and the White House effort to push its health care message comes as allies in the states are working quietly behind the scenes to build legislative coalitions.

“It’s probably early,” said South Carolina state house minority leader Todd Rutherford, a Democrat from Columbia, who participated in the White House call last week for Palmetto State reporters.

“It is off-season for us politically because we’re in session from January to June,” Rutherford continued. “One of the questions was, ‘Why now?’ We seem to only be engaged in politics from January to June.”

In Maine, state Rep. Linda Sanborn said she and fellow Democrats are trying to build a majority large enough to override a likely veto by Republican Gov. Paul LePage. The White House call Monday came a day before LePage announced the hire of a conservative consulting firm to study the cost to the state to expand Medicaid.

“They brought him in to try to find fraud and abuse and prove why we shouldn’t expand,” Sanborn said. “That hit the papers immediately after that phone call.”

Sanborn, a retired physician who sponsored the state’s Medicaid expansion legislation that LePage vetoed earlier this year, said she doesn’t know whether the White House publicly pushing Maine lawmakers will help or hinder her efforts.

“With the White House getting so much bad publicity about Obamacare and the failure of the website not working,” she said, “I’m not politically savvy enough to know the answer to that question.”

OFA has adopted the strategy across the country, celebrating short segments in local newspapers and on television stations, even when as few as a dozen people participated.

In other words: the fearsome Obama campaign field machine — an operation that still possesses some of the best digital and data assets in all of politics — is more than happy to count a handful of people in front of a local congressional office as a victory. The immediate goal is to change the conversation even if the votes in Congress aren’t there.

On a call with grass-roots volunteers to celebrate their work during the government shutdown last month, OFA Executive Director Jon Carson pointed to a string of positive local media mentions as evidence of the organization’s success — as well as a robust digital engagement strategy that ultimately convinced more than 1 million people to tweet at elected officials

“We were absolutely dominating and driving local media and, as we’ve talked about so many times, that is what members of Congress pay attention to,” Carson said. “They see what’s going on in social media, and when they see that local evening news, when they see that local paper, when they see that we can hold them accountable, they understood that this had to end now.”

Nothing seems too small for Carson to tout.

Last week, he tweeted an OFA blog link, highlighting a sampling of positive letters to the editor about Obamacare.