As Barack Obama enters his third year in office, he faces a radically different Congress and a more conservative electorate, with which he needs to connect if he expects to win a second term in office. He tried to get off to a good start on triangulation this week, attempting to get ahead of the Republicans on fighting regulation. He took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to inform America of his new initiative to find and end “dumb” and counterproductive regulation. But the only example of one such regulation Obama could offer as a sweetener has a certain false and insubstantial taste to it:

[W]e are also making it our mission to root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb.

For instance, the FDA has long considered saccharin, the artificial sweetener, safe for people to consume. Yet for years, the EPA made companies treat saccharin like other dangerous chemicals. Well, if it goes in your coffee, it is not hazardous waste.

That’s it.  That’s the only example Obama offers of a regulation that needs to end — and it isn’t even on the books now anyway:

The EPA wisely eliminated this rule last month.

In fact, Obama states that he will add more new regulations in this essay than examples of reducing them:

• New safety rules for infant formula
• Hospital regulations to stop spread of preventable infections
• “Target[ing] chronic violators of workplace safety laws”
• Establishing the new CAFE standards

Color Cato unimpressed with the effort:

So what does Obama see as an example of an excessive regulation needing repeal? The example he offers is the inclusion of the sweetener saccharin in the category of hazardous waste. Really? Saccharin as hazardous waste? Amid dozens of high-stakes, much-studied regulatory controversies, the only one he could come up with is one that — with all due respect to the people who make the little pink packets — is of hardly any significance to the wider economy, and not much more as a matter of principle?

Even this administration could have made better deregulatory boasts than that. For example, in a fit of sense, the Obama Justice Department a while back adopted regulations specifying that the Americans with Disabilities Act should no longer (as of this March) be interpreted to require restaurants, theaters and other Main Street businesses to admit patrons’ non-canine ‘service animals’ such as monkeys, goats, snakes and spiders.

But it was almost as if his point was to pick a regulation so minor that no one cared much about it one way or the other. Had the President’s speechwriters been looking for an example of a hazardous-substance rule that would actually get people talking about regulatory overreach, they might have picked EPA’s dairy-spill regulations, which (in the words of one report) ‘treat spilled milk like oil, requiring farmers to build extra storage tanks and form emergency spill plans….’ That one does have big and widespread economic costs.

This entire exercise sounds a lot like Obama’s initiative almost two years ago to go after all the waste in the federal budget — the one that shaved $100 million from the budget he just signed that pushed federal spending to $3.5 trillion.  That didn’t even amount to 1% of the pork that Obama approved when he signed the massive omnibus that completed the FY2009 budget in March 2009.  Something tells me that this sudden and showy attack on regulation will be another 0.0029% solution after the Obama administration runs up the level of regulation by a third … or even more.

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at [email protected] with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

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