By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG


WASHINGTON - As the bonus payments to executives at the taxpayer-supported American International Group set off a firestorm of anger among lawmakers and the public, something about the scene rang familiar: it was a sliver of news, seemingly a side issue, running out of control.

In the grand scheme of today’s taxpayer expenditures - $787 billion for economic recovery; another $700 billion to shore up shaky financial institutions; who knows how many more billions tomorrow - the $165 million in A.I.G. bonuses amount to small change. But the small change became a big deal in an instant, dominating the talk shows and threatening to undermine President Obama’s domestic agenda.

“This is the kind of issue Washington chases like catnip,”David Axelrod, Mr.Obama’s senior adviser, lamented in an interview. “What would be a mistake would be to get so distracted by the catnip-chasers that we lose our own path. We are not going to do that.

Mr.Obama is hardly the first American president to grapple with a distraction that grew bigger than itself. Ronald Reagan had the Air Force’s $7,622 coffeepot and the Navy’s $435 claw hammer, as well as an illfated effort to save money by classifying ketchup as a school lunch vegetable. Bill Clinton had a high-priced haircut from a Beverly Hills stylist aboard Air Force One. George W.Bush was blindsided by an executive branch decision to contract with Dubai Ports World, an Arabowned company, to manage terminals in six American ports.

What these stories share is a simple and clear narrative that captures the public imagination by tapping into some larger fear or existing perception -“a proxy for a bigger concern,”in the words of Ed Gillespie, former counselor to Mr.Bush. If that concern runs deep enough, the side issue becomes the main issue.

Thus did the A.I.G. bonuses become a symbol of long-simmering taxpayer resentment over Wall Street bailouts, and economic inequity in general, raising essential questions about fairness and personal responsibility - themes Mr.Obama has repeatedly evoked. The story line had shock appeal: wealthy executives get rewarded for driving the economy into a ditch.

“These things catch on because there is some fundamental issue that people are able to attach to,”said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an expert in political communication who directs the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.“There has to be a sense of good and evil, a dramatic arc to it that makes some intuitive sense, so it can’t be terribly complex.”

Mr.Reagan’s Pentagon purchases, for example, unleashed pent-up anger over wasteful defense spending, while ketchup- as-a-vegetable reinforced perceptions of him as uncaring toward the poor. Mr.Clinton’s Air Force One haircut undercut the image he had presented as an ordinary guy in his campaign against the first President Bush.

“The story about the haircut, even though it was a nonsense story, caused a big drop in his standing on being in touch with people,” said Stan Greenberg, Mr.Clinton’s pollster at the time.

The argument that the Obama administration made recently that it was bound by previously signed contracts in explaining why the A.I.G. bonuses would have to be paid may have been a reasonable policy argument, but politically, it was tone-deaf.

“Under these circumstances, you have victims and you need to find a villain,”Ms.Jamieson said.“We need a narrative explanation that tells us how we got here, and attaches blame.”

Mr.Obama seemed to sense the public’s need for blame last week, judging by his administration’s fast change from the contract-is-a-contract narrative to a new, more appealing message.“Listen, I’ll take responsibility; I’m the president,”Mr.Obama told a crowd in Costa Mesa, California, on March 18. The next day, appearing on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,”he declared,“We’re going to do everything we can to see if we can get these bonuses back.”

Congress seemed to sense the need for blame as well. Representative Paul Kanjorski, the Pennsylvania Democrat who was chairman of last week’s A.I.G. hearing in the House, viewed the session as a kind of catharsis - a public venting that he said he hoped would clear a path for Mr.Obama to turn the nation’s attention back to the larger question of how to stabilize the economy.

“I think it was healthy that we did it,”he said.