{"id":28700,"date":"2014-11-20T00:01:29","date_gmt":"2014-11-20T05:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28700"},"modified":"2014-11-16T09:33:33","modified_gmt":"2014-11-16T14:33:33","slug":"qotd-obamas-negotiation-skills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/11\/20\/qotd-obamas-negotiation-skills\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Obama’s negotiation skills"},"content":{"rendered":"

[President Obama] said he would take executive action on immigration by year’s end unless Republicans passed a bill. It\u2019s certainly a bold negotiating tactic: You can do what I want, or I\u2019ll go ahead and do what I want anyway. This is how you \u201cnegotiate\u201d with a seven-year old, not a Senate Majority Leader.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure that isn\u2019t what Obama thinks he\u2019s doing, and I\u2019m sure many of my left-leaning readers are chuckling right now at the comparison. But Mitch McConnell is not a seven year old; he\u2019s an adult, and he just won an election in which voters repudiated Obama and his party. (Temporarily, I am sure, but just the same: As someone once said<\/a>, \u201cElections have consequences.”) McConnell is not the proverbial Tea Party extremist who won\u2019t negotiate; he\u2019s an establishment guy, known as a strategist and a tactician, not an ideologue (which is why the Tea Party isn\u2019t that fond of him). In short, he\u2019s someone who can make deals. Responding to McConnell\u2019s rather gracious remarks about finding common goals by announcing that you know what the American public wants, and you\u2019re going to give it to them no matter what their elected representatives say, seems curiously brash. It might chill the atmosphere today when he sits down with congressional leaders.<\/p>\n

I wonder if Obama even knows how to negotiate with Republicans. It\u2019s not as if he has a long, distinguished record of passing legislation in a mixed environment. His later years in the Illinois State Senate enjoyed a solid Democratic majority, and he jumped into the U.S. Senate at a propitious time. Soon after he arrived came the wave of 2006, when Democrats controlled both houses of congress by comfortable margins, and Senator Obama was far too junior to be negotiating with the White House. Then came the financial crisis, and another wave, and Obama spent the first two years of his presidency in a happy situation where he could get things done without needing the support of the opposition. He didn\u2019t even negotiate with his own party; the Senate negotiated his health care bill, and Nancy Pelosi whipped it through the House.<\/p>\n

Post 2010, of course, he also hasn\u2019t had much practice negotiating. I\u2019m not interested in another tedious argument about who did what to whom; whatever the cause and whoever\u2019s fault it may be, the fact remains that the president has spent the last four years in a stalemate: Neither party can leave, and neither party can win.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a little late in the president\u2019s career to learn the fine art of making deals with people who fundamentally disagree with you, but might be willing to work on whatever small goals you might share. I suspect it feels more comfortable to go along with the strategy that has worked decently well over the last four years: hold your ground, complain about Republican intransigence, and hope that Republican legislators give you another opportunity to play long-suffering adult in the room.<\/p>\n

Megan McArdle, “Does Obama Even Know How to Negotiate?”, Bloomberg View<\/em><\/a>, 2014-11-07.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[President Obama] said he would take executive action on immigration by year’s end unless Republicans passed a bill. It\u2019s certainly a bold negotiating tactic: You can do what I want, or I\u2019ll go ahead and do what I want anyway. This is how you \u201cnegotiate\u201d with a seven-year old, not a Senate Majority Leader. I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,41,13],"tags":[158,698,432,572,553],"class_list":["post-28700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-congress","tag-diplomacy","tag-leadership","tag-senate"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7sU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28700"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28701,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28700\/revisions\/28701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}