NLinStPaul has a good diary at Daily Kos that examines Obama’s approach to politics and how it can be ruthlessly effective. I think she makes many fine points, some of which I’ve been making for two years now. However, just because he wins the argument both substantively and politically, doesn’t mean he will get what he wants. It can’t hurt, mind you, but the failure of the 60-vote strategy is probably final. At best, the health care bill will get the momentum it needs to pass through reconciliation. At worst, the Republicans will pay a significant political price for killing health care reform. It’s still a positive sign for the next three years, but it just might have taken too long for the administration to figure out how to plow forward against united opposition.
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
The thing I find mildly amusing about all this is that it’s taken Obama supporters and would-be supporters so long to figure out that this is the Obama strategy. (This diary is a good sign, but I’m sure most people still don’t get it.) It’s something like what we used to call “building a paper trail,” except a lot more visible to a lot more people and under very dramatic circumstances. Another old phrase that comes to mind is, “You give them enough rope to hang themselves.” It’s very slow, you take a lot of hits (from all sides) along the way, you need tremendous self-discipline, but at a certain point it becomes devastating becaus your opponent has “painted himself into a corner.” It’s certainly a kind of political judo. Very effective against bullies.
Except it hasn’t been. The situation right now is Dems with 51 seats in November in the Senate. That’s insane, maybe he can pull it out if the strategy works but here’s the thing.
It’s not a mystery. People who are angry at Obama like I am have thought this would be the way it would go. But it hasn’t been the entire year. He’s been unable to do it right lately. Either his attacks are too weak at exposing them or they get drowned out, or people don’t care because they stop thinking when they hear “Obamunists!” or the concentrated stupid of the media. The thing is, he’s shown no evidence of being able to do what the diary says with any effectiveness until the Q&A with the GOP.
I hope he can improve because right now, things look pretty bad in terms of keeping even one chamber in the congress.
I think he’s been ramping it up the last few weeks. He was waiting for the moment. Now he has no choice — but the moment’s as good as any. Maybe better. The situation has ripened, shall we say, like a fine old limburger cheese, producing quite a fragrance.
It’s a long time between now and election day.
Can voters tell the difference between a cheese so finely aged….and one that’s rotten?
If the R’s weren’t cutting Obama’s political ground from under his feet with their superior propaganda aimed at independents, I might agree with you.
The Dems will pay dearly at the polls for their messaging ineptitude and Obama will pay for leaving his signature bill in the inept (if not corrupt) hands of Congressional Dems.
Get ready for a harsh spanking.
Coming from the South Side of Chicago, Obama should have known better. I’m forced to believe that he does know better. He’s not a pliant idiot like W.
Perhaps he has no core beliefs except remaining in power. That would seem to apply to about 75% of the Democratic Party.
You’d probably agree that he’s very smart. So how does it make sense that he’d look at the polls and think this is a strategy for remaining in power, if that’s his only priority? There are only two possibilities: either he’s not so smart after all, or he’s playing a longer-term game with other goals.
NLinStPaul has a good diary at Daily Kos that examines Obama’s approach to politics and how it can be ruthlessly effective.
How successful will it be when we lose the Senate later this year?
Look, I’d be the first to admit that Obama has made unforced errors. However, I strongly maintain that the environment itself is wildly toxic, in essence a lesson in how American politics is strongly and inherently skewed Right.
I often maintain that stance in Obama’s defense, but the takeaway is that there are no correct tactics to use against Republican intransigence. They can and do lie with impunity, reverse themselves without taint of hypocrisy, and relentlessly obstruct while the media spins their bald gamesmanship as principled opposition.
Remember the oh-so-mocked Republican Plan from last year? The really sexy thing with the circles? Do you see the lasting fallout from that supposedly embarrassing episode? I sure don’t. So this new and clever strategy is to trap them into admitting something less ridiculous (we have no plan), and the trap will slam shut?
I don’t see it.
I agree with your description of the situation but one need only to look at the Clinton White House tactics for a road plan on how to beat the R’s.
All depends on the audience for the Feb 25 cage match.
Too much of what has gone in the past year is not widely known except for what the media has hyped.
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“At worst, the Republicans will pay a significant political price for killing health care reform.”
Massachusetts defeat was not about health care, but difference was made by angry independent voters worried about the state of the economy.
Lake pointed to polling released by the Economic Policy Institute showing that 65 percent of Americans thought the stimulus served banks interests, 56 percent thought it served corporations and only ten percent that it benefited them. “That is a formula for failure for the Democrats. We have to deliver on economic policies that take on Wall Street and we have to do it for five months, not just five days. We really have to deliver on the policies.”
Once the Democrats lost the health care vote, voters will just remenber the failure. See also the “Cornhusker kickback”. No campaign can deliver the message: “but the Republicans were to blame.” Look at the poll whether country is moving in the right direction, nearly 60% answer wrong direction.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
One has to agree that failure has been the theme of Obama’s first year. Just what has he been able to accomplish? Saving Wall Street and the banks? The high unemployment rate that continues obviously frames this success as a success for Bush’s “have-mores,” not ordinary people.
And since the Republicans have succeeded in hiding Bush all year, the current dire domestic and foreign policy situations will fall in Obama’s lap. People have short memories, apparently, and especially if they aren’t reminded of the recent past.
Obama got dealt a few bad hands. He played a bunch of hands badly (or his direct reports did). And now he’s calling in the chips. And essentially telling the GOP that he knows they’ve got nothing.
We are about to see how good a poker player this president is.
Too bad so many people wanted him to be playing chess.
Booman, thanks for this post, and for your ongoing analysis of Obama’s strategies. One of the under-discussed divides among progressives is, to oversimplify, between organizers and activists. From the perspective of this former organizer, much of the “activist” critique of Obama stems from an ignorance of the organizing tradition that contributed to his political education.
In community organizing jargon, the Feb. 25 health care summit is an “action”, and therefore it’s a key moment for the campaign to pass health care reform.
Most of the time, citizens are forced to go to meetings where others (town zoning boards, city councils, state legislative committees, governor’s “advisory” boards) set the date, set the time, set the agenda, and set the rules for discussion, debate, and decision-making. Anyone who’s gone, for example, to a state legislative committee hearing knows how frustrating and humiliating it can be to arrive early to “sign up” to speak (often for 1 minute only, or some other limited time), and then wait for hours while members of the committee, followed by other members of the legislature, state and local government officials speak (for as long as they’d like). When the citizens finally get to speak, the room is mostly empty, the cameras are gone, as are most members of the committee.
An “action” of the type Obama would have learned to organize when working for the Gamaliel Foundation in the 1980s is a large public meeting where the leaders of the community organization set the date, set the time, set the agenda, set the rules for discussion, debate and decision-making, and invite their followers and members to participate. The goal is to create a public setting in which public officials and/or business leaders are forced to response to the agenda and interests of the citizens represented by the community organization. The public officials show up and respond because the community organization has built up and demonstrated enough political power that it is in the self-interest of those officials to show up—whether they want to or not.
Those officials of course always do have the option not to show up—just as Congressional Republicans are threatening to do now with the Feb. 25 summit. The risk they run by not showing up is of appearing petulant, unreasonable, disrespectful, out of ideas and out of touch with their constituents. (That’s why Republicans, in the end, are likely to show up on Feb. 25.) It’s why for the next several days Republicans will be frantically trying to negotiate (publicly and privately) terms for the summit’s agenda and procedural rules that will be more favorable to them.
The problem Republicans have with these pre-summit negotiations is they’re in a weak bargaining position. Part of it is structural: Obama is the president, and they’re not. Part of it is of their own making: they’ve spent months complaining about the Democrats making “backroom deals”, and pleading for transparency via televised negotiations. Now Obama’s giving them televised negotiations—most Americans won’t look favorably on the Republicans if they don’t show up.
In an “action”, leaders of a community organization not only create the agenda and rules for the meeting, they hold a “pre-meeting” several days in advance with the officials invited to the meeting. At the pre-meeting they’ll go over the agenda and rules with the officials and negotiate around the details of the meeting. (“Governor, you think 3 minutes isn’t long enough to speak? Okay, how about 5 minutes? By the way, that’s longer than any of our leaders will speak.”) The goal is to have a meeting that is procedurally “fair” and that forces the invited officals to declare themselves as allies or opponents on this issue.
What community organizers and leaders know is that most people support them on the merits of their issue, just as Obama knows most people want health care reform. What community organizers and leaders know is that the arguments of their opponents cannot withstand the light of day, just as Obama knows the Republicans have no substantive health care reform proposal (that has not already been co-opted into the Democrats’ plan).
Finally, community organizers and leaders know that “the purpose of an action is to force a reaction”. Obama’s health care summit forces the Congressional Republicans to react. They can react by boycotting the event. They can react by participating and seeking to “improve” (from their perspective) the Democrats’ plan so that health care reform passes Congress with overwhelming majorities. They can react by putting together a Republican plan that they rally around and refuse to compromise with the Democrats. The goal of Obama’s Feb. 25 “action” is to create a situation in which, regardless of which reaction Republicans choose, the goal of passing a major health care reform bill into law is advanced.
Whatever the Republicans do, I think it’s almost a guarantee that Obama gets the last word at the summit—thanking everyone for participating, providing his interpretation of what happened, laying out what the next steps will be, and making the case (morally and pragmatically) for moving forward. Congressional Republicans know that’s not a good position for them to be in. They also know they don’t have much choice.
Like it or not, Obama has thus far been a remarkably consistent political figure. He’s a center-left Democrat who wants to accomplish a big agenda (end the war in Iraq, health care, education and energy reform) and shift the country’s politics and culture to the left for the next generation. It’s why Republicans and conservatives fear him. It’s why progressives and Democrats should figure out how to help create the political circumstances that allow him a greater chance to succeed.
Excellent comment, and worthy of a diary.