Democrats will try to stave off electoral disaster in November with tools like these: electric-car batteries, free mammograms and loans for dry cleaners. Promoting each of those sounds modest, practical and nonideological -- which is precisely the point. After 18 months of pushing big ideas, in big legislation, with big price tags, President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are stepping up the rhetoric of small. You can see it in the administration's piece-by-piece rollout of the new health care law, and Obama's travels to highlight individual benefits of economic stimulus legislation. And you can see it in the small-business lending fund that the administration is advocating on Capitol Hill alongside Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who beseeches colleagues to act in the name of the Taco Sisters restaurant in Lafayette, La. No wonder the incumbent party wants to move from macro to micro. Upset over slow growth, accelerating debt and unemployment near 10 percent, voters have not discerned large benefits from the $787 billion stimulus or the $938 billion health care law. Even the new Wall Street regulation Obama signed into law last week, which Democrats see as a populist campaign weapon, has not paid big immediate dividends. 'If you can't do it in the moment when people are paying attention,' said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, 'how are you ever going to get any traction?' By talking a lot more about simplified mortgage paperwork and reduced credit card charges, that's how, said Joel Benenson, Obama's pollster. 'Within each of these large achievements,' Benenson said, are discrete benefits 'specifically directed to the struggles that people are having.' He added, 'The campaign is just being engaged.' DIGESTIBLE MESSAGES As he sought re-election in 1996, President Bill Clinton set the modern standard for what his successor, George W. Bush, would derisively call 'small ball.' Blocked by a Republican Congress on larger priorities like health care, Clinton lowered his sights and appealed to suburban swing voters with priorities like promoting school uniforms, and V-chips to block offensive television content. Obama, by contrast, has advanced one expansive idea after the other. But the end of that phase will be evident this week when the Senate takes up drastically scaled-down energy legislation. Republican campaign veterans are not surprised by the Democrats' turn toward selling their enormous initiatives through more digestible messages. Nor do they seem worried that it will impede their midterm election momentum. 'I don't think they have any choice but to start talking about small steps,' said Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole's Republican presidential campaign against Clinton in 1996. 'The big things they've tried to do are all 40 percent issues.' But Obama lacks a key strategic advantage that his Democratic predecessor in the Oval Office enjoyed. Clinton's small initiatives came as a relief to voters exhausted by the aggressive conservatism of a Republican Congress led by Newt Gingrich, then the House speaker. Since Democrats control the White House and Congress alike, 'Obama doesn't have anybody to contrast with,' Reed said. 'He doesn't really have a bogy-man right now.' A SHARPER APPROACH The White House demonstrated its step-by-step messaging on health care last week with a video from Michelle Obama and Jill Biden on new preventive care services, and the award of grant money for states to assist new parents. Obama's aides insist it is gradually working, pointing to polls showing an uptick in public support for the health care law. 'Good luck with that,' said Newhouse, the Republican pollster. The administration and Democratic candidates are only 'treading water' with such positive messages, he said. Instead, he predicts the Democrats' chance for keeping control of Congress will turn on the effectiveness of their negative campaigning against Republicans. And the sharpening partisanship of Obama's recent rhetoric shows how, indeed, attacking in the home stretch represents a critical element of Democratic strategy. To draw the sort of contrast Reed alluded to, Obama will revive memories of Bush, who left office with dismal approval ratings, and accuse Republicans of attempting to revive policies that helped cause the recession and financial crisis in the first place. At the same time, Democrats will hit Republicans for having tried unsuccessfully to block the bite-size benefits for average families they boast of delivering. To counter Republican charges of big government, they will argue that the minority party favored banks over college students on student loan policies, insurance companies over patients on new coverage mandates, Wall Street over Main Street on consumer finance protections. 'Fighting at every turn to protect big corporate interests,' Benenson said. 'That's the record they're going to have to defend.' 