President Obama is trying to persuade voters that he supports America's smallest businesses, one jar of blueberry jam at a time.

Small is in. Small is sweet. Small, let's face it, is comprehensible. When global problems are so migraine-inducing, a Cabinet full of high-powered micro-shoppers could become bigger than the sum of its itsy-bitsy parts.

What, you ask, are we talking about? The answer: Small Business Saturday. After tromping through America's malls on Black Friday, the president wants the savviest consumers on the planet to save a little plastic for Saturday. Shop small; shop Main Street; and please shop American-made, the Obama administration said Wednesday.

The president, leaving no micro-initiative or tax-cutting successes behind, will dispatch members of his administration around the country Saturday on a mission to support what’s great (but tiny) about America’s job-producing economy … and they’ll bring their wallets along.

“These businesses create two out of every three new jobs in America, helping spur economic development in communities across our country and giving millions of families and individuals the opportunity to achieve the American dream,” Obama said Wednesday in a written statement.

“The president has been a long and continued strong supporter of small businesses, which really drive our economy,” enthused the head of the Small Business Administration, Karen Mills, during a conference call with the media. “His commitment is deep, and it includes, as you probably know, 18 small-business tax credits” enacted during his term, she noted. “All across the administration we’re engaged in making sure [small businesses] can do what they do best, which is grow and create jobs.”

Mills told reporters she planned to spend the Thanksgiving holiday at her home in Maine, so her celebration of Small Business Saturday will include loads of blueberry jam purchased at a Brunswick farmer’s market, to serve as holiday-season gifts.

Other VIP consumers, Mills announced, will be Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood; Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (hello, Topeka!); Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan; and uber-shopper Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the president, who will patronize a local bookstore and restaurant in Chicago on Saturday.

This year, Occupy Wall Street organizers are encouraging Black Friday shoppers to boycott the mega-capitalist discount retailers in favor of local small businesses. A National Retail Federation survey found that as many as 152 million people could hit the stores this weekend, potentially a 10 percent improvement over 2010.

In truth, the bulk of America’s small businesses are not the sort of locally owned mini-retailers we think of with such nostalgia during the holiday season. But sure, the charming images of home-grown hardware stores, corner bakeries and dress boutiques persist. Of about 25 million small businesses in the country, 6 million have employees, Mills said. From coast to coast, there are just 690,871 retail small firms, the SBA’s Office of Advocacy reports.

There was a time after 9/11 when President George W. Bush’s critics clobbered him for suggesting that the healthiest thing Americans could do after a massive national shock was to keep on doing what they liked to do, including shopping. President Clinton, blocked by congressional Republicans on his way to re-election in 1996, turned to miniscule initiatives, such as enforcement help for school uniform policies, to capture voters’ attention and to demonstrate presidential empathy for kitchen-table worries. Thinking big got Bush into trouble by his second term, but thinking small helped rescue Clinton’s reputation for governance.

On Saturday, and perhaps on many other days between now and November 2012, President Obama and his team will encourage Americans to see that small can really add up.