Tag: Peter Daou

It Will Make You Want to Cry: Up Date

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”:

That Pesky Window and the Stopped Clock

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What is it that the Democrats do not understand about Negotiating 101? Peter Daou states it succinctly how the Republicans have dominated the debate and why the Democrats fail so miserably

There is a simple formula for rightwing dominance of our national debate, even when Democrats are in charge: move the conversation as extreme right as possible, then compromise toward the far right. It’s negotiation 101.

The Democrats just don’t get it.

House Minority Leader, John Boehner will call for the resignations of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and White House Economic Advisor, Larry Summers. While I can’t disagree with him, since I thought the appointment of these two was wrong from the start, Boehner is doing it for all the wrong reasons because everything that Geithner and Summers have done so far is almost exactly what the Republicans would have done were they in power, continuing the banking and financial industry bail outs, watering down Financial regulation and cutting the stimulus bill to making it ineffective in creating jobs. It’s almost like these two are “moles” for the Republicans but Boehner is making them the starting point of the conversation. While the media mentions that Boehner supports the renewal of the Bush tax cuts to “to sparking job growth”, they failed to mention that those cuts have been in effect for the last 10 years and have failed to stimulate the economy or create jobs. The Democrats need to hammer that home, instead they waffle

It is no wonder, as Daou continues to point out,

it matters not one iota if Obama is a progressive at heart. What matters is that Democrats run away from the left like it’s the plague while Republican run to the right like it’s nirvana. The net effect is that the media end up reporting far right positions as though they were mainstream and reporting liberal positions as thought they were heinous aberrations. And you wonder why America is veering off the rails?

The left can’t push that pesky Overton Window to the middle so long as they continue to muddle the negotiations and allow, as David Waldman called Boehner, a “Stopped Clockwork Orange”, to dominate the bargaining table.

h/t Corrente