The Obama White House is addicted to the “unprecedented.” Perhaps it was a sign when President Barack Obama sat down in January to record his first weekly address and announced: “We begin this year and this administration in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that calls for unprecedented action.” What has followed is declaration after declaration of “unprecedented” milestones. Some of them are legitimate firsts, like the president’s online town hall at the White House in May…. “It says how very unique he feels he is,” said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in the Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations. Hess described Obama as “a man who sees himself as unprecedented in every way … given his background – his mother, his father, where he grew up, how he became president of the United States.” “Of course, biblically, there’s nothing new under the sun, and for most everything he’s done as president there is some precedent for somewhere,” he added. “What he does is variations on a theme.”