Krugman: The President Is A Lousy Negotiator (apparently Paul Krugman has been reading my posts)

[Cali_Democrat]

I knew Krugman read DU :)

Here's my post from earlier this month....http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=580468&mesg_id=580468

Here's Krugman's blog today:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/the-president-is-a-lousy-negotiator/

The President Is A Lousy Negotiator
March 28, 2011, 9:27 am


Steve Benen and Ezra Klein both point out that by negotiating with himself, Obama seems to have ensured that the eventual budget “compromise” will give Republicans more than they ever imagined in the way of harsh cuts.

Maybe this is just political realism. But the way I see it, Obama adopted Republican framing of the budget debate — including the rhetoric about how families are tightening their belts so the government should too — as early as the 2010 State of the Union, back when Democrats had 59 Senate seats and control of the House. If that genuflection to the right was supposed to help Dems in the midterms, well, it didn’t; and it has meant that there is no effective counter-argument to the cut cut cut people.

So, can we now count on Obama, at least, not to preemptively surrender to the right by proposing Social Security cuts — cuts that we know will be a starting point, not an end to the discussion?

No, we can’t.

Maybe now Krugman should also listen to me about the Fed's money printing and how it's going to lead us to inflationary disaster :)

[ProSense]

1. Republicans Prepare To Reject Final White House Budget Offer

Republicans Prepare To Reject Final White House Budget Offer

Brian Beutler

It's been almost a week since House Republicans, Senate Democrats and the White House last sat down to hammer out a budget agreement, and the schedule's still blank. Accusations of bad faith are now flying from both sides. Republicans are poised to reject a White House offer, TPM has learned, that would cut over $30 billion in current spending because of disagreements over whether the package should include cuts to mandatory spending programs. Democrats are pushing for such cuts, which include the big entitlement programs, though the specific cuts they're proposing remain unclear. In an ironic twist, Republicans oppose those cuts and want to limit the negotiations to non-defense discretionary spending, a smaller subset of the federal budget.

<...>

Late update: To put a finer point on all this, Harry Reid issued a statement this afternoon saying the negotiations aren't going anywhere.

I am extremely disappointed that after weeks of productive negotiations with Speaker Boehner, Tea Party Republicans are scrapping all the progress we have made and threatening to shut down the government if they do not get all of their extreme demands. The division between the Tea Party and mainstream Republicans is preventing us from reaching a responsible solution on a long-term budget that will make smart cuts while protecting American jobs, and prevented negotiations from taking place over the weekend even as the clock ticks toward a government shutdown. Apparently these extremists would rather shut down the government and risk sending our economy back into a recession than work with Democrats or even their own leadership to find a responsible compromise.
"For the sake of our economy, it's time for mainstream Republicans to stand up to the Tea Party and rejoin Democrats at the table to negotiate a responsible solution that cuts spending while protecting jobs.

Krugman and others missed the point. The $30 billion in cuts were among those already proposed by the administration. Democrats are simply rolling them out during the negotiations. Republicans are now having to reject cuts because they aren't the disastrous cuts they're seeking.

Will the GOP go so far as to cause a shutdown?

[msongs]

14. President prepares to give it all away before negotiations being. that's his M.O. nt

[indepat]

2. There won't be an inflationary disaster, at least not officially, for there are liars, damned liars,

then there are statistics. :patriot:

[ClarkUSA]

3. KRUGMAN on HCR: "This is a reasonable, responsible plan. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise."

The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs... For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7903672

Krugman was against HCR before he was for it. He likes to play Chicken Little without any basis as do others.

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[ClarkUSA]

10. No, it is accurate. Krugman is a Chicken Little prior to every piece of major legislation.

[vaberella]

25. This is 100% true. He really needs to keep his mouth shut until the information is out. n/t

[vi5]

4. Wow, who could have possibly seen this coming?

Has there been a single goddamned thing that needed to be effectively negotiated and/or fought for that this president didn't concede before things began and even then only winding up with the Republicans spitting in his face?

Seriously, I'm done even trying to pretend that any of this is anything other than flat out pathetic.

[Autumn]

11. I think a lot of us see this

problem and have for quite a while. I don't understand why he continues this bipartisanship crap. Pathetic is right.

[vroomvroom]

5. Is Anyone Surprised? nt

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

6. Unrecommend. Krugman can't make up his mind. First, he says that he's against

the HCR bill. Then, he says that it represents smart, pragmatic thinking and can be improved on in future years. Now, he says that Obama is a bad negotiator?

Make up your mind, Krug.

[vi5]

12. He only said it was good....

...after it was clear that because of everything that was given up by our side so early on in the process that it was pragmatic to accept it as "something" rather than "nothing".

If he had said from the outset that the bill was pragmatic then you'd have a point. But his endorsement of the bill came only at the point where it was clear that everything most people on our side wanted (public option, drug re-importation, stronger enforcement bodies, etc) was already given up in the "pre-concession" phase and was long gone as a possibility and people were claiming to want to kill the bill. He never fully flip flopped and said it was a good bill. At best he said it shouldn't be killed because it was better than nothing.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

13. But, what's the difference? If the reality was that Republicans were going to stop EVERYTHING

in its tracks, I don't see how we could have ended up with anything more.

Hell, the *only* reason that HCR got through was because the Democrats pushed Reconciliation.

Remember that there were 5 bills - 3 in the House, 2 in the Senate.

We couldn't get Kucinich's single payer through even the House. And the other two proposals that contained some form of public option weren't going to get through the House and definitely not the Senate with the filibuster.

I'm merely suggesting that Krugman and his supporters be intellectually honest about this. It didn't matter what the president did. The Republicans were not going to give him one, single vote.

Blaming Obama is senseless. It oversimplifies a very complicated process.

Krugman should know better, but he's allowing his passion for principle get in the way of reality.

[Cali_Democrat]

16. Obama isn't solely to blame for the lack of a public option and/or universal health care

However, he started our from a position of weakness. He should have started the negotiations with medicare for all and gone from there. There was massive support for the public option at the time. He could have framed the debate. Instead he let the repukes frame it with talk of death panels.

The same case can be made for the budget cuts. He's already stated that he's met the Republicans half way and he's prepared to do even more. That's poor negotiating. Obama should have started out firmly on the side of no budget cuts for social services. Announcing that you're already prepared to meet the rethugs halfway is stupid. Does he actually think that the repukes will act in kind and meet him halfway as well?

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

19. Point well made, and I don't disagree, but it does take leadership in the chambers

as well. In other words, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Carl Levin, John Kerry...all these leaders in the Senate must stand up and fight, even if it means going against their leader. It is not unprecedented that Congress and the Executive branch are sometimes at odds. Change really begins in the Congress, especially the House. If you have a House that is willing to sit back and allow everything to fall, then the president's hands are tied. All he has is the veto.

We need to elect more progressive Democrats. That won't happen if we sit on our hands and refuse to vote to the point that we have even nuttier Rethugs in the Congress.

I have seen no reasonable solution put forth by these pundits for how the president is supposed to deal with a recalcitrant House and a milquetoast Senate.

He can't, nor does he have the authority, to do it all himself.

Finally, I blame the media. I do remember Obama out on the road at many town halls talking about death panels. How often did the Corporate Media air these speeches/town hall chats? The media spent much of its time on the Teabaggers and less on what the other side is saying. President can't do this alone. Many Democrats ran away from HCR. Many of them were cowardly, even co-opting Rethug talking points themselves. President can't do it himself.

[politicasista]

21. He isn't by himself, but agree that

Dems should step their game up.

[vi5]

17. We can agree to disagree....

I fully believe we would have gotten a fair deal more than we did....on this and on everything else that required any negotiation if we had not started out from a prone position.

I'm sorry but as someone who has done various forms of negotiation for a living for the past 20 years, even the most pathologically insane of the republicans are still subject to the most basic human tendencies of negotiation. If we're on one side and they are on the other, and then before negotiations start we already concede that we will move to the middle then just basic laws of human nature mean we're going to wind up more on their side than ours. He doesn't make their side risk anything. He doesn't put them in tough positions of having to defend themselves.

It's not even just on HCR. It's been on everything. We're seeing it right now with the budget fight.

And I'm sorry but the lack of willingness to actively fight, to actively and willingly risk anything substantial in the negotiation process, to lose face in a substantial way is a weakness and it's a weakness that the Republicans have pounced on and exploited.

Again, nothing I say is going to convince you. You can be perfectly content to accept the shoulder shrug as a valid excuse to hold the president blameless and that's your prerogative. And that's fine. But there are a lot of us who do know the process, who aren't naive, and who aren't stupid and who still know that even in the face of rampant obstructionism we could have gotten much more than we have, and one of the main reasons we didn't is because of Obama's unwillingness to put up a fight on anything.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

18. 20 years ago, we had reasonable Republicans. This current crop of Republicans

do not pass the reasonable test. Sadly there are no longer the Lincoln Chaffee's around.

You have to be a bit more reasonable in this. The president could have made all the speeches in the world. He went to the Republicans many times. Still, they were hell bent on voting against EVERYTHING, even their very own ideas!!

The mandate was THEIR idea.
End of Life counseling was THEIR idea.
Being able to purchase plans across states was THEIR idea.
There was even tort reform, which was THEIR idea.

And still...

Well, you get the idea.

We have to disagree. And I'm well aware of what a lot of my friends here on DU think. I just disagree and I'm unafraid to do so. While *BOTH* the president and the Democrats in Congress deserve some blame, they still have to legislate. If the votes aren't there, they simply aren't there. Krugman proceeded to blame the president entirely for that without ever being behind the scenes to witness what really happened. I think it's shortsighted. I think he's wrong. And I say this as a huge Krugman fan!

[vi5]

20. Then to use an admittedly crappy metaphor.....

If something starts as a small fire in your house, and you try to use the spray nozzle from your kitchen faucet to put it out and that doesn't work and the fire gets bigger and more dangerous and more threatening, do you continue to try and use the kitchen nozzle just to prove a point? Or do you adjust your tactics and your weapons for fighting that fire accordingly and escalate your actions as the fire gets bigger and more dangerous?

Again, it's a crappy metaphor but it still fits. I agree that the republicans are not the same republicans from 20 years ago just as the metaphorical house fire is not the one that seemed like it could be put out with a crappy kitchen faucet. They are bigger, and more threatening and more dangerous, and unfortunately it's much more risky for any elected leader who opposes them to try and use the same tactics from 20 years ago. These are not the same republicans that Tip O'Neil had beer with after legislating, and it's naive to try and handle them in the same way, under a false assumption that they will negotiate in good faith.

I do commend you because you seem much more willing than most to at least admit that there are problems on our side, and are much less "with us or against us" than many on here tend to be. I appreciate that, despite the differences we may have in assigning blame or playing Monday morning quarterbacks (which face it, that's all any of us have the power to do when it comes to most of this stuff).

Cheers.:toast:

[Autumn]

7. Looks like it. I agree with both you and

Krugman.

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[polichick]

15. Well done, you! :)

[Cali_Democrat]

24. Thanks!

:D

[bvar22]

22. Negotiator?

LOL.

K&R

[brentspeak]

23. Obama is an outstanding capitulator, however

"Ok, GOP and US Chamber of Commerce: Before we talk, let me just say that I'll give you everything you want. All right, now let's get down to business..."