Daniele Varé - "Diplomacy is the art of letting the other guy have your way."
There has been a lot of hand wringing in the past few weeks (tempered by our 'victory' on DADT) about how Obama was never a liberal and how we should become disengaged from the political process since we're obviously not taken seriously. This is bullpucky. So I thought I'd set down some rules for negotiating with 'the enemy.'
Rule One: Negotiate with Your Opponent, Not the Arbitrator.
Like it or not, Obama is a reasonable guy and he is going to try and hammer out compromise no matter how disparate the starting positions are. Most Americans like that. Most of us liked that, until we thought that we had been betrayed. We haven't been betrayed. Obama did what an arbitrator should. He charted a course between the two extremes that was roundly disliked by all but acceptable to most.
Our mistake was in giving up our position before negotiations even began. Our job is not to negotiate with Obama. He is the POTUS, not the President of Liberals Only. He's supposed to be in the middle. (Bush was supposed to be in the middle too, but his failure as a man isn't Obama's fault either.) You don't negotiate with the arbitrator. Our job is to articulate the progressive/liberal position to the best of our ability and insist that it is the only right position to have. Let Obama occupy the middle. We need to be negotiating from the left with those that are negotiating from the right. Then the middle might actually be the middle. In order to do that, though, we need another rule.
Rule Two: Start with What You Want, Not What You'll Settle For.
Take healthcare. Many of us would have been ecstatic with a complete government takeover of healthcare whether it was the VA system done large or Medicare for all. We wanted a single payer system, but we were willing to settle for a public option. That was our mistake. Instead of starting with single payer or universal healthcare, we started from the public option. The Republicans wanted the status quo. Can we really be surprised that what we got was a deal that didn't have a public option and kept some of the status quo? Imagine what would have happened if we had been demanding universal single-payer healthcare and a public option became the compromise position?
Rule Three: Quid Pro Quo, Clarice.
When the arbitrator demands both sides give up something, don't give up Manhattan for a handful of glass beads. Giving the Republicans three quarters of a trillion in return for a few months of unemployment insurance and the payroll-tax holiday seemed unfair to most of us precisely because it was. We gave up a lot more than we got. Of course a big part of that was because we also broke Rule Two; we should have been fighting to restore Kennedy tax rates and been willing to compromise down to Clinton levels. But let's be clear, Republicans had long telegraphed that what they wanted was an extension of the Bush tax cuts. Instead of permanent, they put two years on the table. Someone (not Obama. Remember Rule One) should have been willing to insist that, for every dollar that went to the very rich, at least that went to the poor and middle class. Instead we got the opportunity to take billions more out of the economy than we put back as stimulus.
Rule Four: If Your Opponent is Unreasonable, Don't Negotiate
This is the toughest one to articulate. Not negotiating doesn't mean not speaking out and insisting on the rightness of your position, it means refusing to compromise with those who refuse to compromise. If the Republicans are intractable (as they are on some many filibuster-worthy things these days), we must be equally intractable. If they won't put anything on the table, there is no point in giving up anything ourselves. If a compromise can't be worked out between opponents, it's up to the arbitrator to chart a way to the middle. If that happened, we might actually end up with a good and necessary compromise still hated by both parties. That would be far preferable to a compromise we hate and the Republicans pretend to hate.
Rule Five: Don't Blame the Arbitrator.
If you break Rules One through Four, don't expect any sympathy when you gripe about the deal. If you can't figure out how to haggle, don't be surprised when you get ripped off. We have a whole set of issues the elusive 'public' agrees with us on from green jobs to lowering the cost of higher education. Instead of letting the Republicans run the God, guns and gays pony show, we need to be bringing our big issues into the ring. Every time Republicans want something done, we need to be insisting that our issues come along or come first. And if we lose a fight now and then, we need to look at what we did wrong. Blaming the only person who is supposed to be above it all is just silly.