Politicians are Weird Negotiators

Let's blog.

This is going to be even more stream of consciousness-y than usual, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how atrociously bad politicians are at negotiating.  You may think I'm talking about how the Obama Administration repeatedly "gives away the baby."  For example, Obama wants cap-and-trade to pass, so he just makes a press conference saying "We will now expand domestic oil drilling" - which is something Republicans want and Democrats by and large do not.  The story goes that if Obama was a good negotiator, he would wait until negotiating with Republicans and say "OK, I want cap-and-trade, you want oil drilling. If you vote for my program, I'll give you more oil drilling."  That's pretty bad negotiating.

Psyche! It's actually really not. The thing to understand is twofold. One, Republicans will reflexively oppose almost anything Obama supports, even if it's their own plan (see: ObamaCare/RomneyCare, cap-and-trade (endorsed by Reagan, Bush I/II and McCain/Palin until Obama came to office, etc.). So he knows he's dealing with dishonest negotiators.  That's a problem! But he still needs to do something, which brings me to: Two, the things that Obama "gives away" to Republicans are invariably popular with moderates/independents.  In other words, I think it's safe to say that Obama is (rightfully) negotiating not with the Republican Party but with the American people.  That's ok. The Republican Party is kind of weird right now, and the best way to bring them back to sanity may be for Obama to convince the American people that he is right and the GOP is wrong.

Oops.  That was all just prelude to my real point, which is this: the Republican Party is really bad at negotiating!  Here's why.  Democrats actually REALLY want to compromise with Republicans, for a lot of reasons.  First, Democrats just like compromise.

See? That's pretty compelling!  Second, Republicans want to do two things: cut taxes and cut spending.  The problem is that we have a huge deficit and historically low taxes, so it's pretty doubtful that we will cut them again.  The other problem is that the only spending cuts that will actually decrease the deficit (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, military) are also the spending that Americans really like and refuse to cut.

So Republicans can do two things now. They can propose a plan with cuts to entitlement spending that is engineered to at least be appealing to Democrats. This is very possible. There are about 104 different deficit plans that are out there that make spending cuts in different ways -- some of them would attract real Democratic support.  Obama authored one of those plans. ObamaCare itself actually cut entitlement spending (in Medicare) by $300 billion over the next ten years - he's serious about this shit.  So if they propose cuts this way, even if those cuts prove to be unpopular (they will be), they'll at least have the cover of saying "listen I know I voted to cut Social Security (or whatever), but it was the right thing to do - that's why Democrats voted for it too."  Fiscal crisis over, political life intact.

The other option is to do what they did - propose an incredibly conservative plan that they KNOW will be unpopular in the country.  They did know this. They aren't dumb. They hired pollsters that told them it.  But no Democrats will go along with it because it is so gosh darn conservative.  And let's not even talk about the first thing that the Republican's "budget" does is just straight up repeals ObamaCare. You really think Democrats are EVER going to vote en masse for that? It's just a nonstarter as a negotiating tactic.

So anyway. Long story short, Republicans just lost a House race in upstate NY that Obama himself lost to McCain by 6 points.  They should've won that easily.  They lost because the Democrat pointed out that the Republican wanted to cut Medicare. That would not have happened if the GOP proposed a plan that attracted Democratic support.  So now they both lose on getting their policies passed and lose elections.

THAT IS DUMB. Why did they do this?! I don't really have an answer, but I bet they feel like numskulls.