Will Someone Please Tell Obama How to Negotiate

Towards the end of George W's second term, going into the presidential campaign season of 2008, the Republicon Party had dealt the Democrats an unbeatable hand; a Royal Flush.

Stunningly, the Democrats never played that hand. They couldn't even recognize that they were holding an Ace, King, Queen, Jack and 10, let alone that they all happened to be in the same suit.

Four years later, with the Dems still holding the same cards while going into the ‘fiscal-cliff’ negotiations over the budget, they were given a second opportunity to play that hand when the Republicons went full-bore far-right-lunatic-fringe  Kenyan-birther community-organizer hip-hop-barbeque apologizing-for-America terrorist-sympathizing-appeaser Muslim-infiltrating black-helicopter death-panel Hitler-socialist second-amendment-remedy mooching- 47% legitimate-rape Acorn-stole-the-election Obama-is-the-Anti-Christ nuts and blew their chance to take over Government. (See my previous post for an elaboration)

However, in one of the most disgusting displays of political ineptitude in American history, Obama and the Dems decided to discard their Ace, King and Queen in order to play a pair of fucking Jacks!

My card playing example may not be a perfect metaphor for the game of negotiating – in the game of poker the players keep their cards hidden before playing their hands. But only a terrible negotiator keeps his cards hidden before negotiating.
The strategy of poker is to keep your cards hidden until the final wager so that you can bluff the other players. Keeping your cards hidden is what makes your position stronger.
The strategy of negotiating is to put all of your cards on the table before you start negotiating. Exposing your cards beforehand is what makes your position stronger.

I do think, however, that my metaphor works pretty well as far as illustrating how utterly inept Obama and the Dems are at the game of negotiating. The best example of this is President Obama’s obsessive compulsion in making the compromise position his starting position. He seems to do this all the time. And then from that point he concedes more than half way to the outrageously unreasonable ultra-far-right position! This is infuriating.
Then, to add insult to injury, Obama gets called a Stalinist dictator by the right-wingers.

Here are some perfect examples.

During the healthcare reform negotiations we had a situation where, due to the huge gaping inadequacies of the free-market model of health insurance, millions of Americans were uninsured, resulting in the premature deaths of thousands of people every single year. You’d think this should be a cause of concern for everyone, regardless of whether or not they had adequate insurance themselves. Yet at the time the Republiconservatives were telling us that the USA had the best and greatest healthcare system in the world and nothing needed to be changed -- except for the money we were spending on the uninsured poor. That needed to be cut drastically.

Now there was a very simple and very proven solution to this problem. It’s called single-payer universal healthcare. Every other civilized country in the world has it. They cover all their citizens at about half the cost we do for only covering some. This solution would not only have solved the uninsured problem, it would have solved our Medicaid and Medicare problem too. It would have solved the problem of preexisting illnesses and losing your insurance if you lost your job. It would have covered every American young, old, poor or sick. It would have been the equivalent of a humongous tax cut for businesses and corporations by relieving them from the burden of providing health insurance to their employees. (Just imagine what a boon this would have been to small businesses) It would have solved the deficit/debt problem in one fell swoop. How? By cutting our medical costs – the biggest driver of future federal spending -- in half!

How the fuck do you lose an argument like this with those facts on your side?
Well, the most surefire way is to not even make the argument in the first place.
Instead of making single-payer his starting position, like he should have, Obama made what should have been the compromise position, the Public Option, his opening bid. Then he caved on that and settled for a convoluted mess that subsidizes private companies with tax-payer money, forces Americans to purchase a defective product and does nothing to lower healthcare costs. And here’s the kicker. This monstrosity was concocted by that bastion of conservatism, The Heritage Foundation. (That’s the think tank where the notorious ultra-right-wing reactionary Jim DeMint left his Senate seat to head) Even though ‘Obamacare’ maintained the conservalibertarian preference of putting a money-hungry private company between you and your doctor, the right called it socialism.

Another perfect example is the Royal Flush which sixteen years (Reagan and Bush Jr.) of supply-side/starve-the-beast economics handed the Dems.
These policies caused most of the problems that we face today and that fact should have been enough to totally discredit the Republicon Party. But the Dems were unable to fully explain to the American people the implications of these policies, including the damage they caused. This failure allowed the Recons to actually put the Dems on the defensive by blaming these problems on out of control big government spending, the ‘welfare state’ and ‘the entitlement culture.’

The Recons have used this narrative very effectively for a long time to brow beat Dems and libs with. They have convinced most people that this is true. We’ve heard it so many times it must be true. But the facts, which are borne out by the statistics, show that supply-side/starve-the-beast policies are to blame.
The fallacy of the Republiconservative narrative was never fully dissected by the Dems. They allowed themselves to be intimidated by those arguments for many years, which allowed the Recons to go unchallenged. Only late in this recent campaign season did the libs and Dems start to present the facts that refuted the Republiconservative rhetoric.

There are many aspects to the Republicon policies that started with Reagan, each one of which requires a separate post to explain. The first one I plan to tackle is tax policy since that is the one thing that the Recons fight the hardest about as evidenced by the current budget negotiations.

The single most cherished belief of Republiconservalibertarians is the fantasy of an infallible, magically powered ability of tax cuts to cure everything from cancer to hoarseness.
The utter, miserable failure of the Bush tax cuts to produce any of the wonderful things that the Republiconservalibertarians swore that they would – except for putting tons more money in the hands of the ‘job creators’ -- is the Ace in the hand that the Recons dealt the Dems.

Stay tuned for my next post where I will give a close examination of the disparity between Republiconservalibertarian rhetoric and reality.