President "let's make a deal"

President Obama, like President Clinton, is a "let's make a deal" kind of guy.  The idea is that getting part of what you want is better than getting none of what you want.  It is also part of the "give and take" that is the mother's milk of politics.  If both sides give a little then each side can take most of what they want and everyone is better off.  That's the theory.  But for this theory to work both sides have to be playing by the same rules.

Rumor has it that President Regan, a Republican, was on very good terms privately with House Speaker Tip O'Neil, a Democrat.  Reagan also spent a lot of time, it is said, talking on the phone with various Democrats.  With solid support from his own party this allowed Regan to rack up an impressive number of legislative victories.  He would hold his Republicans and peal off enough Democrats to get his bill passed.  And buried in all this were concessions to Democrats to seal the deal.  That's how it is supposed to work.

And that's how it did work, most famously under President Lyndon Johnson, the role model for Presidents trying to work congress.  But then Newt Gingrich came along.  Newt decided that this "go along get along" approach that Regan had used so successfully was the wrong way to go.  So Newt set about to change the rules.  He started recruiting Republicans that would hold party discipline to be of paramount importance.  He also started using litmus tests and drumming Republicans that were not doctrinaire enough out of the party.  He was able to pull this off because he figured out how to raise vast amounts of money.  In several cases Newt engineered the defeat of Republicans who he thought weren't pure enough.  His theory was that he could get the seat back later.

All this came together in 1994.  By this time Newt had purged the party of most moderates who did not want to go along with him.  And he applied his giant war chest effectively.  He got enough of his people elected that enough house seats went from "D" to "R" to swing control of the House from "D" to "R".  As a result of this success Newt got himself elected Speaker.  With all the pieces in place he implemented his strategy.  It was "no compromise - my way or the highway".  No more of this woozy negotiation stuff for him.

For a while this flummoxed Clinton.  He is a charmer and if you put him in the room with anyone he can logic or charm or whatever pretty much anyone, including Newt, into a deal.  So Newt's handlers made sure he didn't spend any "one on one" time with Clinton after they figured out what was going on.  The result was that Clinton's agenda quickly ground to a halt.  You can't do "let's make a deal" if the other side doesn't want to make a deal.  But Clinton figured out how to counter this strategy.

Politicians know that the secret of success is to be seen as doing good things and stopping bad things from happening.  It really is that simple.  If the other guy is elected he will do bad things and block good things from taking place.  That's the fundamental message of any election campaign.  So if a bad thing happens then it must be the fault of the other guys.  And this is important because voters tend to remember the bad things more than the good things.  That's why negative campaign adds work.

What Clinton did was he drew a line in the sand.  He was arguing with Republicans about the budget.  He said the Republican budget was so bad he would veto it.  And he did.  And the government shut down.  He then said "This is all the Republicans' fault as I am a deal maker and if they had been reasonable the government would not have had to be shut down".  And the public believed him and the Republicans had to back peddle and a budget was quickly passed and the government went back into business.  Now shutting the government is a pretty big bad thing.  But as a result of this the Republicans took Clinton seriously and he was able to make deals with them.

The point of all this is that at some point you have to stand up and say "this and no more" and mean it.  You must accept the real possibility of bad things happening if you don't get what you want.  Otherwise the other side will assume they can roll you because you are a wuss and your threats are empty.  President Obama has gotten himself into this situation.  The Republicans think he is a wuss.  I think he is a wuss.  As such, Republicans believe, with a massive amount of evidence to support their position, that in the end the President will back peddle and take the Democrats with him.  So they don't deal with him on a serious basis.  The only way to correct this situation is to hold your position and let bad things happen.

Now unfortunately we are in the position where many bad things can happen.  The government can be shut down in a few months if we don't raise the debt ceiling.  There is no Defense spending bill so we might need to shut down the DOD while two wars are going on.  The extensions to unemployment have expired.  The Start II treaty is being held up.  All these things are bad things.  All of them are in a bad place because of Republican intransigency.  And the things that are happening (unemployment) or could happen (debt ceiling, defense bill, Start II) are very bad things.  So, if Obama wants to hang tough, should he pick one of those?

No!  There is a better choice.  The Bush tax cuts are about to expire.  Obama has said he wants to extend them to anyone earning under $250K but not for those making more.  What happens if they all expire?  Well, actually not much bad.  Taxes go up a little for the under $250K set and a lot for the over $1M set.  But for the under $250K set it's not that much.  And almost $4 trillion of debt increase won't happen.  And Republicans get blamed for increasing every one's taxes.  The conventional political calculus is that this is a very bad thing.  But it seems pretty manageable to me.

And it can be fixed next year with a retroactive bill.  So most of the damage is potential rather than actual.  And the "filibuster" calculus changes.  The Republicans have to originate a bill in the House then the Senate has to pass it.  And even with some defections, the Democrats will have enough members in the Senate to filibuster anything they don't like so the monkey is on the back of the Republicans to come up with something.  And, of course, Obama could veto it, if he doesn't like it so they have to come up with something that is Democrat friendly.

So all kinds of good things happen if the Democrats follow my (and Senator Schumer's) advice and let the whole Bush package expire.  Now President "let's make a deal" Obama might have trouble going along with this.  But Republicans stopped paying attention to him a long time ago.  And Democrats need to tell the President he needs to be with them on this one.  If he goes along he will finally get some leverage with the Republicans.  They will no longer be able to ignore him.

This is tough medicine.  But the take away from the recent election for me is that it's OK to be irresponsible.  Republicans have gotten away with being irresponsible by saying "nothing bad happened even though we did all those irresponsible things".  And they are right.  They were bailed out and covered for by the Democrats being responsible.  And being irresponsible is, by definition, irresponsible.  The responsible thing to do, given that some irresponsibility is necessary at this point, is to be responsibly irresponsible.  And the Bush tax cuts are the right place for it, assuming you even believe that letting them expire is irresponsible.

Obama needs to take a stand somewhere and this is the best place.

(added 12/7/10 - Pearl Harbor Day for God sakes)
Today the President said "I will fight".  Well, I've watched this President fight Republicans for nearly two years now.  And as a fighter, it would be an insult to wusses to call him a wuss.  On the Bush tax cuts, letting everything expire is a far better deal than the one he has come up with.  He needs to stop prematurely capitulating on issues.  He needs to stop punishing his friends and rewarding his enemies.  He needs to get a lot smarter a lot faster about how to negotiate.  And he still has a badly flawed picture of what Republicans will and won't do.

Unless he cleans up his act, I am going to be looking for another Democrat to challenge him in the 2012 primaries.  At this point he has succeeded in losing my support.  And I am sorrier about that then he is.