Peter Daou points out that the White House is bringing Paul Krugman to tears with its political strategy that has been a failure:
Look: early on the administration had a political theory: it would win bipartisan legislative victories, and each success would make Republicans who voted no feel left out, so that they would vote for the next initiative, and so on. (By the way, read that article and weep: “The massive resistance Republicans posed to Clinton in 1993 is impossible to imagine today.” They really believed that.)
This theory led to a strategy of playing it safe: never put forward proposals that might fail to pass, avoid highlighting the philosophical differences between the parties. There was never an appreciation of the risks of having policies too weak to do the job.
And then it led the administration to keep claiming that the legislation it had gotten through was just right, long past the point when it was obvious that the policies were inadequate.
(emphasis mine)
Keeping the same failed strategy and repeating the same mistake is just absurd. It is a given that when you are so far down in the polls that it time for something daring, yet, as Jonathan Cohn points out, “it depends on who’s talking”:
Recent Comments