WASHINGTON – President Obama in his State of the Union Address this week will double down on his strategy of using a “pen and phone” to advance his agenda without Congress, White House senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer said Sunday.
“He is going to look in every way he can with his pen and his phone to try to move the ball forward,” Pfeiffer said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Obama has often used executive orders and agency rulemaking to bypass Congress, where a Republican-run House has stymied the president’s policy goals.
But he’s promising to take that go-it-alone strategy to a new level in 2014.
“We’re putting an extra emphasis on it in 2014,” said Pfeiffer, adding that Obama will “assure to the American people that we can get something done either through Congress or on our own because what they want are answers.”
Still, Obama in his big speech Tuesday night will stress that he isn’t giving up on working with Congress as he purses an agenda that includes fixing income inequality and passing comprehensive immigration reforms, said the adviser.
“We’re working where we can with Congress and acting on our own where we can,” Pfeiffer insisted in a separate appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”
“The way we have to think about this year is we have a divided government,” he said. “So we have to find areas where we can work together.”
Pfeiffer said that the president recognized that “the public ended 2013 very frustrated.”
“We had a shutdown, a near default and then the problems with the Healthcare.gov website. All of us in Washington, the president included, need to do what we can to restore trust with the American people,” he said. “That’s what the president is going to begin on Tuesday night.”