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.

Who will not be the republican nominee?

This guy! Rick Santorum.  He is pretty horrible. Santorum fills the necessary "so religious that I actually hate most people" slot of the republican candidates. He used to be senator of Pennsylvania but wound up losing by a lot to a not-that-impressive candidate (Casey) because he was such a nutter.  He's obviously pro-life and anti-gay but that's really just the beginning. He's not a big fan of women working either.  You know how lots of weirdos run for president all the time? Santorum is one of them. He has a zero percent chance of winning.

The most interesting thing about Rick Santorum is that he pissed off awesome gay-activist Dan Savage a while back with his anti-gay ramblings. Dan Savage is the same guy behind those really emotional "It Gets Better" ads. Anyway, years back, Dan Savage somehow used the internets to make it so when you search for "santorum" on google, you get this. Pretty good revenge!

And now, two of my favorite things: gay rights and Pixar

Yay Election 2012!

I love elections. They're hilarious and weird and the stakes are huge and most of the people who compete are either interesting or insane.  This time around the Republican field is actually pretty cool, in a weird way.  I'd say there are four categories of candidates:

1. Libertarians - Ron Paul and Gary Johnson. Combined, they have a 0% chance of winning
2. Crazy people - Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Buddy Roemer. I think Michele Bachmann has maybe a 1% chance of winning, and the rest have zero. But they're kind of funny!
3. Semi-sane people who are going to pretend to be crazy to win votes - Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty. Combined, they probably have a...75% chance of winning? I dunno. it
4. Sane people - Mitch Daniels, Jon Huntsman. I guess this means they have a 25% chance of winning. The problem with being sane in the GOP is that the GOP has lately become relatively divorced from reality (see birtherism, climate change denialism, the Ryan plan, individual mandate, whatever).

There's a fifth category, but it is hypothetical:
5. White nights - Rick Perry, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush. These are people who GOP elites are trying to get to run because they think the candidates in categories 1-4 all suck.  Mitch Daniels is technically in this group right now, but I think it's fairly likely that he runs.

Anyway, that's it. We've got a good cross-section of personalities there, as well as an unusually strong crop of sane people who have a real shot at winning.  I may write profiles of some of the cooler cats later.

What do liberals and conservatives believe.

OK, I'm still psyched about Osama getting murderized, but back to more substantive concerns.

I want to take a step back and just try to focus on what liberals and conservatives believe, and why.

First, Democrats generally stand for the following proposition: The United States as a nation has a duty of providing a level of social security to all its citizens, regardless of whether they are rich or poor. This means that the government is involved in education (public schools), guaranteed retirement (social security), health insurance (Medicare/Medicaid/ObamaCare).  The converse to that, of course, is that rich people get better education, are able to retire, and get much better health care, while poor people don't.

And we're not doing this just to be nice - we're doing it because we are stronger as a nation when people don't have to work until they're on their deathbeds, when we invest in future generations, and when people don't have to go bankrupt when they get sick.  This is security - and in that security is freedom. If a person knows that he'll have a guaranteed pension when he retires, he can take more risks in life and feel more confident starting his own business.  So, although those sloganeering Republicans decry all of this as "socialism," it's really strengthening capitalism. That's why the middle class didn't come to be in this country until these social safety nets were put in place.

Obviously, I am a proud Democrat.

Republicans, generally believe in "small government." That means the less the government does, the better, as the free market is a better allocator of resources than the government. This means more private schools - possibly purely private schools. Privatization of social security. Vouchers instead of guaranteed health care when you're old. And of course, lower taxes. So the calculus here is people are "freer" because they'll pay less in taxes. Of course, a person making $50K a year who can't afford a good health care plan would probably argue that they're not really as "free" as someone making $500K when they get cancer and have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital fees...but sure, that's what they believe, and that's fine, I guess. It's just pretty simplistic - if taxes are lower, you are freer. It's a simple slogan (and powerful!).

A lot of times conservatives characterize liberals as just setting up these safety nets because they're bleeding heart hippies. They're not. Most liberals I know hate hippies! Free love can screw itself. We believe in these policies because they make the middle class stronger, and because it is wrong for poor people to have less opportunities to succeed than the rich.

Did torture help us catch Osama?

OK, enough cheerleading for the day, on to some substance.

Some Republicans/conservatives are already saying that this whole thing validates Guantanamo Bay and the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," a.k.a. actions that are torture under the laws of the international community, the U.S. government, the U.S. Code of Military Conduct, and history. This is dumb, for about threereasons. [I picked that number randomly - let's see if I can think up that many.]

1. This is the most important: just because torture worked in getting information here doesn't mean that non-torturous methods, the ones that the military or law enforcement traditionally have used, would not have been equally or more effective.  In other words, even if torture yielded good information on this one occasion, there is no evidence that it yielded the information faster than other techniques.  Every study of whether torture is effective shows that it yields mostly just lots of BAD information - if someone says "tell me what you know!" before ripping out your fingernail, I'm pretty sure you'll say something, whether it's true or false. That's the technical problem with torture.

2. Morality matters. We shouldn't go around pretending to drown people. We're America. And even if we can make an exception for that dumb hypothetical of "there's a nuke in a major American city that is about to explode omg we must immediately torture this random computer analyst to get information," that wasn't the case here. Either we are a country who tortures or we are not.

3.  The ones using this as a political wedge, saying that Obama should now learn that torture and Gitmo are good - remember that it was GWB who ended "enhanced interrogation" and called for closing Gitmo.  This wasn't Obama's choice alone, he had the endorsement of his predecessor.

4. Just because we got the information from a Gitmo detainee does not mean that Gitmo is now validated. No one is saying that we should not detain and interrogate true prisoners of war. The argument is that we don't detain them forever with no trial or due process. We can still detain and interrogate these bastards as long as we don't discard our rules of law in the process. Because, you know, that's actually exactly what they want us to do.

I win. Four reasons. I dare you to have good arguments against any of them. This is a really dumb debate and it always has been.  AMERICA SHOULD NOT TORTURE PEOPLE. C'mon.

Quiz Question

Who said this:


“Thank God for President Obama . . . If he had not been there, who knows what would have happened?President Obama has continued the Bush policies of keeping a military presence in the Middle East. He did not scrub the mission to get Bin Laden. In fact, it may be that President Obama single-handedly came up with the technique in order to pull this off. You see, the military wanted to go in there and bomb as they always do. They wanted to drop missiles and drop bombs and a number of totally destructive techniques here. But President Obama, perhaps the only qualified member in the room to deal with this, insisted on the Special Forces. No one else thought of that. President Obama. Not a single intelligence adviser, not a single national security adviser, not a single military adviser came up with the idea of using SEAL Team 6 or any Special Forces.”


Click here for answer.  

More cool background on catching Osama

I'm not sure if this more reflects the strength of Obama's methodological, calm and structured approach to pretty much every issue, or just the benefit of having new eyes look at a problem. Steve Coll writes about changes Obama made to finding Osama when he took office.

"After President Obama took office, he and the new Central Intelligence Agency director, Leon Panetta, reorganized the team of analysts devoted to finding Osama bin Laden. The team worked out of ground-floor offices at the Langley headquarters. There were at least two-dozen of them. Some were older analysts who had been part of the C.I.A.’s various bin Laden-hunting efforts going back to the late nineteen-nineties. Others were newer recruits, too young to have been professionally active when bin Laden was first indicted as a fugitive from American justice.

As they reset their work, the analysts studied other long international fugitive hunts that had ended successfully, such as the operations that led to the death of Medellín Cartel leader Pablo Escobar, in 1993. The analysts asked, Where did the breakthroughs in these other hunts come from? What were the clues that made the difference and how were the clues discovered? They tried to identify “signatures” of Osama bin Laden’s lifestyle that might lead to such a clue: prescription medications that he might purchase, hobbies or other habits of shopping or movement that might give him away."

This is just really heartening. It's how our government should work: look at how we've done things in the past and replicate those techniques.  Very heartening.