Ezra Klein wrote about the current White House's
attempts to hearken back to the Clinton showdown with Gingrich as a model. At HuffPo, Jason Linkins
picks up the idea, pointing out that in "attempting to recreate this magic, the White House is going full sail, and have even apparently picked their foil, in the form of Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.). (Presumably, this is because Clinton's foil, Newt Gingrich, has not aged well.) As Glenn Thrush points out, 'Obama has prospered most when he's had an obvious antagonist.'"
There's a hell of a lot more to successful negotiating than picking the right antagonist (and chances are good that Ryan is just too earnest to match Gingrich, we'll see). There's a lot more history to plumb from the Clinton experience, as Mark Sumner reminded us Sunday.
President Clinton, in the midst of a tough fight for this own political life and facing Republican control of both legislative chambers, emerged from negotiations with a deal that protected the budget while forwarding Democratic interests. Clinton was, and is, an acknowledged centerist, but he carved out a deal that protected the poor even as he was agreeing to give the Republicans some of what they wanted on the business side. He managed this by not only making his case behind closed doors, but in public. He did it by staking out a negotiating position and sticking with it. He did it by playing chicken with the Republicans in the budget showdown of 1995 and not blinking. When the GOP sat down with Clinton for those negotiations, they did it knowing they were dealing with someone who would take it to the wall and beyond.
Mostly Clinton won at the negotiating table by being willing to lose. By being willing to take a blow. By being willing to be disliked. By being ready to sit there as long as it took to strike a reasonable deal. He won by not surrendering.
Michael Waldman, Clinton’s chief speechwriter at the time, continues this theme in a conversation with Greg Sargent.
While Clinton, a New Democrat, did push for welfare reform and call for a balanced budget to restore his fiscal credibility, the former president pivoted from there to a major, protracted public fight over Medicare — and an unabashed defense of a liberal role for government — that was crucial in restoring his public standing.
Few remember this part of the story, but Waldman notes that Clinton seized on the Medicare standoff to reaffirm his support for the social contract as embodied in Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare promise to America, frequently referring to proposals to cut Medicare as an affront to our “values.” Clinton even used Johnson’s pen to veto the GOP’s budget....
Contemporaneous press accounts indicate that it was only after Clinton adopted this strategy of fighting that he began to rise in the polls.
Waldman, who oversaw the writing of those speeches, acknowledged that Clinton had first needed to move to the center. But after that, he made his move. “He drew a clear line in the sand on the things that he wasn’t going to compromise on,” Waldman says. “He fought a real public battle on those things. He drew a sharp line on core principles, and fought for them very hard.”
Waldman noted that Obama now has a chance to do the same. “This is an opportunity for him to spell out with clarity his vision of the role of government,” Waldman said. “If he doesn’t, it will be an opportunity lost.”
That's the kind of pivot Josh Marshall argues Obama could and should make on Wednesday. That's the Clinton template that the Obama White House needs to be studying.