Bargaining.
Can someone please teach this administration how do it?
As RJ Eskow points out on ,
HuffPo
We're being told we should celebrate a "compromise" in which Democrats gave up $38.5 billion in spending cuts, when the original Republican demand was for $32 billion. That means the Democrats only gave the Republicans 20% more (20.2135%, to be precise) than they originally demanded.
And this isn't the first time we've been told to celebrate an "historic accomplishment" that looks like it belongs in the opposition's win column instead of the Democrats'.
Why aren't more Democratic commentators hammering this administration over its abysmal negotiation skills? Maybe if enough noise is made, the President and his staff will reconsider the wisdom of beginning negotiations with a massive capitulation. It seems to me an intervention is in order....
Before Health Care Reform negotiations began, single-payer was removed from the table. Then administration began waffling on the public option as early as July, 2009. Obama issued a denial that he was abandoning the public option.
Then in August, President Obama himself spoke of the public option as an expendable item. . Specifically,
Obama continues to believe that "the option of a government plan is the best way to provide choice and competition," Gibbs said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
But if there are other means to achieve that, Gibbs said, "the president will be satisfied."
And a day earlier, Obama said at a healthcare forum in Colorado that "the public option, whether we have it or don't have it, is not the entirety of healthcare reform."
I remember all of this well because it was at this point that I realized we had an administration that was not going to fight for progressive policies. (Why, I don't know and no one else does, either, except President Obama and his circle. Answers range from the political to the personal, but I won't speculate. The important fact is that the administration does not fight for progressive policies.)
If Gibbs was to be believed, this is a White House that would not even fight for "the best way to provide choice and competition," our best chance of lowering the rising, outrageous costs of health care.
What was important was to pass a bill. What was in that bill was less important than the passage of the bill itself.
Obama's supporters seem largely to agree with this strategy and will heartily applaud anything that the president can check off on his "to do" list. What can we expect? they ask. The president has to negotiate with crazy people.
Yes, that's true, but there's the rub. How does he negotiate with them?
Is it wise to negotiate with crazy people by staying in their fantasy land, letting them define the terms, conceding that down is up at the get-go?
Perhaps I'm being unfair, but it seems to me that something is seriously wrong with your approach when you achieve a "historic" agreement that gives your opponent 20% more than what he opened negotiations with.
This administration has accomplished a fairly good-sized list of impressive-sounding achievements. But when you look past the titles and at the policies themselves, you find loopholes and provisions that benefit corporations and the wealthiest 1 percent over ordinary citizens. In other words, they lean right.
For example, Kaiser Health News provides a handy chart that compares the 1993 Republican HCR proposal with the 2010 bill:
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/...
There are people here who insist that the 2010 HCR bill is a "progressive" achievement. If this is accurate, then we have stretched the meaning of progressive to include the GOP's HCR proposal in 1993. And farther to the right we slide.
The president has made deal after with the GOP in which he has conceded much and gained little. The Bush tax cuts for the rich are renewed in exchange for an extension of unemployment--which would have been extended anyway. And now this budget agreement further validates Republican framing: austerity for the working-class and poor help pay for goodies for the wealthy.
I hope that President Obama does some soul-searching and realizes that it's up to him to protect the least among us, not to cut funds that help provide for housing for the poor in order to pay for those tax cuts for the rich. If he doesn't dig in and start taking some firm stands for a government that regulates polluters, invests in alternative energy and infrastructure and "human capital," and helps to level the increasingly slanted playing field, he may win another term but lose his chance to leave a legacy beyond "Obama was here."
He will lose corporate support if starts driving harder bargains for the average citizen. But he would win the enthusiastic support of millions of voters who could make up for it in 2012.
But first, he needs to decide what is non-negotiable, let us know, and be a better bargainer for the average citizen, who, in these days when people are even working for free , need for government to be what it was from FDR's "New Deal" through LBJ's "Great Society" and "War on Poverty."
There is still time for an about-face. After all, Obama did fast ones on telecomm immunity, secret detentions, the public option, the Bush tax cuts, and assorted other issues. He can just as easily turn into a president who bargains hard for the "little people."