The press conference Obama just held could not have been nearly as effective or electrifying if it were not for the fact that the Republicans have made any reasonable offer short of everything an impossibility.
By refusing any deal that included revenues, or serious concessons to the Democrats, they made their own victory impossible. We should understand that the Republicans have gotten so extreme, so over the top, that even what would be considered big victories by Republicans of the past, will be political failures for them.
They literally cannot please their constituents. They are so obsessed with doing so, that they've lost all awareness of what anybody else wants. But us? We can be pleased simply by the raising of the debt limit.
We lament our side's flexibility, but the truth that we've absorbed that the Republicans have not is that our constituency, our base is not the whole affair. To win, we have to get the center to come with us.
The Republicans, over time, have straitjacketed themselves with all kinds of promises and dogmatic requirements, many of them having pretty soft support in the public. They've painted themselves into a corner.
It's to the point where they are unable to keep government functioning. I think people are beginning to realize that.
This is not the best position to negotiate from, despite the tentative concessions it can get at first. Once people understand that there will be no concessions from your side, and they respond accordingly, there's not much you can do to encourage them to concede more, or even stick to already made concessions. If there is no way to get a yes out of you, and nothing's final, then your own position, your own unwillingness to accept a deal prevents you from gaining the victory!
It is a literally self-defeating position, especially when you arrange that position against a do-or-die, must-pass piece of business like the Debt Ceiling. We have only to look to the earlier negotiations over the government shutdown and how the Republican's position collapsed there to see where the strength really lies.
The Republicans want what they can't have, and following that is steadily destroying the party and gutting its popularity. You cannot win a negotiation if you hold out for impossible concessions to allow yourself to win.
But of course, what's the alternative? That's the beautiful part about this, from my perspective. Once the Republicans become reasonable, then all the energy they spent pushing their supporters to support being unreasonable, to support being this radical backwashes against them. Their followers desert them. Even if they win in policy terms, they lose in political terms, and that means we can come back around, defeat them politically, then rewrite policy.
The Republicans have built a political bubble here, driving up their profile through speculation on political value. But like all speculative rallies on value, the thing being bid up has to eventually offer a return on investment. If Republicans, after all their bullshit, cannot provide true return on investment, if they are politically unable to get their job done, if doing as they promised ends up with things just as bad as if they had broken their promises or worse, the Republican brand, I feel, will collapse.
We should recognize that we may be on the verge of breaking the Republicans, and we don't even have to be particularlly obstructionist. We just have to offer them one concession after another that they can't take, and they're going to help us break the political power of their party by not doing the sensible thing and take yes for an answer.