Turns out, Obama's a good negotiator. For a Republican

Progressives, with their pesky little concerns about income inequality, unemployment, and lost homes, got fucked again.  And what did I tell you?  Ezra Klein is impressed:

...The White House disappeared into a closed room with the Republicans and cut a deal that they'd made no effort to sell to progressives. When the deal was cut, the president took an oblique shot at their preferences, saying "the American people didn’t send us here to wage symbolic battles or win symbolic victories." And this came a mere week or two after the White House announced a federal pay freeze. The pattern, for progressives, seems clear: The White House uses them during elections, but doesn't listen to, or consult them, while governing. In fact, it insults them, and then tells them to quiet down, they got the best bargain possible, even if it wasn't the one they'd asked for, or been promised.

If you're worried about stimulus, joblessness  and the working poor, this is probably a better deal than you thought you were going to get. "It’s a bigger deal than anyone expected," says Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "Both sides gave more expected and both sides got more than expected." The White House walked out of the negotiations with more stimulus than anyone had seen coming. But they did it in a way that made their staunchest allies feel left behind, and in many cases, utterly betrayed.

That the Obama administration has turned out to be fairly good at the inside Washington game of negotiations and legislative compromise and quite bad at communicating to the public and keeping their base excited is not what most would have predicted during the 2008 campaign. But it's true.

The administration is only good at the "inside Washington game of negotiations and legislative compromise" if you believe they are, in fact, stealth Republicans instead of Democrats, constantly ceding ground and seeding the turf for their wealthy donors.. 

Which I do.

And it's "only a better deal than you thought you were going to get" if the deal is made by capitulators who make promises they have no intention of keeping, and, even with the polls and the facts and decency and morality on their side, they give in without the fight the issue deserves.

Which they did.

And Ezra Klein can only write this tripe if he is a Stepfordized beltway liberal-turned-insider who needs to grease the wheels of Washington access so he, too, can end up with his own show on MSNBC.

Which he is.

Gergen learns: Taibbi's no door Matt

A few weeks back I wrote about a funny exchange between Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and David Gergen of CNN in which Taibbi's bomb-throwing, F-bombing style clashed with the ever-staid, ever-upstanding Gergen.   The CNN pundit was opining about the business community's unhappiness with Obama, despite the record profits and massive bonuses accrued on his watch. Taibbi couldn't take it any longer, blurting out,  "Fuck the business community!" Gergen, dumbfounded, echoed his words in a way suggesting heresy: "Fuck the business community? That's what you said?"

But that wasn't even the weirdest part.   Gergen seemed surprised byTaibbi's rough edges and made a few remarks to that effect that never made it into the magazine. Taibbi didn't know what to make of it, and then it came to him --  Gergen, it seems, had gone through the entire interview thinking he was talking to Matt Bai of the New York Times.    That explained it: Matt Bai -- who, like Gergen, preaches the gospel of bipartisanship -- is the last person Gergen would have expected to use such incendiary language. You don't climb the D.C. journalistic ladder pissing off others on the way up. And, if there's anything you never say, it's "Fuck the business community." You gotta fluff those feathers, not ruffle them.

Taibbi sees Bai as a prototype: the liberal journalist who turns on his own as he learns to go along to get along in Washington.

Bai is one of those guys -- there are hundreds of them in this business -- who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning "centrist" pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing "unrealistic" liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures. This career path is so well-worn in our business, it's like a Great Silk Road of pseudoleft punditry. First step: graduate Harvard or Columbia, buy some clothes at Urban Outfitters, shore up your socially liberal cred by marching in a gay rights rally or something, then get a job at some place like the American Prospect. Then once you're in, spend a few years writing wonky editorials gently chiding Jane Fonda liberals for failing to grasp the obvious wisdom of the WTC or whatever Bob Rubin/Pete Peterson Foundation deficit-reduction horseshit the Democratic Party chiefs happen to be pimping at the time. Once you've got that down, you just sit tight and wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to call. It won't be long.

 

Bai is the poster child of those guys. So naturally Gergen must have been shocked to see, well, Matt Bai screaming kill-the-rich brickbats at him over coffee and pastries. I had a good laugh imagining that somewhere, at that very moment, David Gergen was telling someone what an asshole Matt Bai is. I wonder if anyone's filled him in on the mistake yet.

 Michael Kinsley, Dana Milbank, and Jake Tapper are a few others in that long line.  Soon joining their ranks? Villager and Obama apologist Ezra Klein. Yes, he's now defending Obama's tax cut capitulation. But, then, you knew that.

Colbert's war on the war on Christmas

This is funny:

An atheist group put up a billboard on one side of New York's Lincoln Tunnel saying of Christmas, "You Know It's a Myth."

Stephen Colbert, a devout Catholic in real life, takes considerable umbrage at this.  "A myth? What part of three kings following a star through a desert to bring presents to an immaculately conceived baby-god they dreamt about sounds like a myth to you?"

The Catholic League was none too pleased either.  It "counterpunched," in the words of a spokesman, with a billboard of its own on the other side of the tunnel: "You Know It's Real: This Season, Celebrate Jesus."

Ever biblically correct, Colbert responds: "Yes, just like Jesus says, if someone slaps you on the cheek, counterpunch!"

 The video is at right.  (For some reason, a tag is broken when I put it in a post, but not in an adjacent column.  My html-challenged mind reels.)

Spank those nasty, bad boys, Obama

 Greg Sargent is back yelling at "the left" for not standing with Obama for not standing up for us:

Facts of life: The reality is that it's increasingly obvious that all the Bush tax cuts are going to be extended. The only real question at this point is what Dems get in return. The reality is also that the left is going to continue lashing Obama mercilessly as weak if the White House walks away with a bad deal and doesn't find a way to negotiate from a position of strength in future standoffs with the GOP.

Sure, the usual suspects will say it's good for Obama to get attacked from the left. But the drumbeat encouraging the perception of Obama as weak and prone to capitulation -- which is beginning to gain traction in the mainstream media, fair or not -- could in the long run could become the narrative and result in a real political problem that stretches beyond the base.

Here's a fact of life:  We'll stop calling Obama weak, when he stops acting weak. I mean, really: "if the White House walks way with a bad deal and doesn't find a way to negotiate from a position of strength," then ... they should stop doing that.  They should walk away with a good deal, negotiating from a position of strength.  If Obama wants to end the perception, he should end the reality.  If this becomes a political problem, good.  Maybe he'll respond by ... not acting weak.

I would encourage he not wait  for "future standoffs" to perfect this art. No time like the present. Once rolled, always rolled and all that.

I'm not even sure "weakness" is the most salient part of this diagnosis.  It's probably more apt to say Obama  doesn't stand behind his promises. I'm not sure that's more flattering, but I'll bite. Why does he do this? It could be out of weakness. It could be due to incompetence.  It could be a lack of principle. Maybe it's all three.  Either way, not good.

Granted, the Republicans are nasty, bad boys, as Larry Craig might say. But what do you do to nasty, naughty bad boys? You spank them. Hard.

Craig would.

Incidentally, if this idea of weakness bleeds into the mainstream media, it's not because they're listening to us. It's because they have eyes, or, more likely, ears -- if the Republicans say it, it must be true. And if anyone, especially Obama, believes we have this kind of pull with the media, then they should by all means listen to us.  It'd certainly be a first.

Hope a dope

I'm with ya, Paul, I'm with ya:

The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?    

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.    

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse  —  a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.  

So what are Democrats to do? The answer, increasingly, seems to be that they’ll have to strike out on their own. In particular, Democrats in Congress still have the ability to put their opponents on the spot — as they did on Thursday when they forced a vote on extending middle-class tax cuts, putting Republicans in the awkward position of voting against the middle class to safeguard tax cuts for the rich. 

 It would be much easier, of course, for Democrats to draw a line if Mr. Obama would do his part. But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs.      

We're not the left. We're the base.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee has a new ad up challenging Obama to live up to his pledge  to end the Bush tax cuts for the rich.  The PCCC has been urging this for a while.  But what's new here is the in-his-face tactic of airing it in Iowa, the place where Obama made this promise three years ago before going on to win the Democratic caucus there.  It was Iowa caucus-goers, in turn, who propelled Obama's campaign and launched him on his inexorable rise to his party's nomination in 2008. As Greg Sargent puts it:

This means actual voters will see the spot, the first hitting Obama from the left of the new cycle. ... The spot demands that Obama stick to his promise and not "cave" to Republicans by extending the tax cuts for the rich.

"We're bringing our ad to the place President Obama made his core campaign promise of letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire," Green tells me. "There is no room for compromise on an issue where the promise is so clear and where the Republicans are standing with the wealthiest 2% of Americans against the entirety of the American people."

Between this spot and the new one unveiled this morning by MoveOn, it's clear that the left has settled on a strategy of actively trying to damage Obama politically with the base and with left-leaning independents by painting him as weak, to force him to draw a harder line against Republicans. The left, clearly, has no intention of stopping with these efforts.

Um, no we don't, although I don't buy the premise we're trying to "damage" him.  As Talk Left's Armando always counsels, it's not wise to invest too heavily in a politician.  It's his or her ideas and policies that we should get behind, or, rather, our policies, the ones we want a leader to implement.  In the case of the PCCC's ad and other forms of advocacy from "the left," we're just trying to get "our" politicians -- the Democrats -- to do what we voted for them to do, and  now pay them to do and hope and expect that they will do.  If that means putting pressure on Obama, that's what we'll do. If that means embarrassing him among voters he'll need a second time around, we'll do that, too.  If it means running through the streets naked -- well, I'll get back to you on that.  But damage him? Putting aside the dubious ethics and mean-spiritedness that implies, what good would that do us?  We need him to be strong and forceful, so he can make "our" case with others not already on board.  If he's damaged, he'll be useless.  You could make the case, actually, that he's already damaged and we're just trying to "fix" him -- not the GOP way, silly -- so he can carry out our plans.  You know, the ones he promised he'd do.  I don't care how or why he does the right thing; I just want him to do it.

I also think it's wrong to say we're "painting him as weak." He is weak. That's evident. Anyone can see it. The Republicans certainly do.  I always picture Republicans off in their cave, or wherever they plot their evil moves, laughing and marveling at how easy Obama is to roll.  

If anything should rile his anger, it's this. And if anything moves Obama to action, it's his own sense of pride and self-preservation.  Again, whatever works, baby.

But while "we're" at it, I don't think it's useful to use the term "the left," particularly by a blogger presumably in that category. What is considered "left" these days is probably closer to what used to be called the center.  But the goalposts have moved so far right, what is now considered "center" is really "right," and what is now called "right" has lurched into wing-dingery, middle-fingery territory.  The media uses "left" to connote a scary fringe too loony to listen to. But we weren't too scary back in '07 and '08 when Obama rode our cheers and dollars and votes into the Democratic convention, and then the White House.  We weren't his foil back then; we were his base.  And if there's a cardinal rule of elections, particularly midterm elections, it's: Don't Piss Off Your Base.

He did, and lost big on Nov. 2.  He has two more Novembers to get it right.

But I'm not hopeful.

Strickland to Dems: Stand up and fight

 Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland isn't afraid to say what he thinks, and he thinks fellow Dems shouldn't be either. Venting to Sam Stein, Strickland said:

"I think there is a hesitancy to talk using populist language," the Ohio Democrat said in a sit-down interview with The Huffington Post. "I think it has to do with a sort of intellectual elitism that considers that kind of talk is somehow lacking in sophistication. I'm not sure where it comes from. But I think it's there. There's an unwillingness to draw a line in the sand."

..."I mean, if we can't win that argument we might as well just fold up," he said. "These people are saying we are going to insist on tax cuts for the richest people in the country and we don't care if they are paid for, and we don't think it is a problem if it contributes to the deficit, but we are not going to vote to extend unemployment benefits to working people if they aren't paid for because they contribute to the deficit. I mean, what is wrong with that? How can it be more clear?"

Addressing the president's self-analysis -- offered after a bipartisan meeting with congressional leadership on Tuesday -- that he hadn't done enough outreach to Republicans, the Ohio governor was equally blunt. 

"I saw what CNN said after that meeting yesterday. A line saying the president said he should have been willing to work with the GOP earlier. What? After all of this you don't realize these people want to destroy you and your agenda?" he asked. "How many times do you have to be, you know, slapped in the face? Look what they did with health care.

"I mean, I understand a reluctance to reach the conclusion that I think a reasonable person can reach: that [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell was speaking the truth when he said his goal was not to govern, not to develop public policy, but his goal is to defeat this president in 2012. And I think when the base understands that that's what's at stake, the base is going to be much more willing to engage and to join the fight. The base is going to be less willing to join the fight if they don't see the clear differences. The differences are there, for God's sake." 

Strickland will be out of a job come January, having lost in a close re-election fight to John Kasich. So perhaps he'll have the time -- and fortitude? -- to run against Obama in a primary.

There. Now I have something to cheer me up in these dismal days of Democrats.