Does Obama Even Know How to Negotiate?

Megan McArdle:

Like many of you, I watched President Barack Obama’s press conference Wednesday to see how he would approach Republicans, and an electorate that just sent him a pretty harsh “Dear John” letter.  Like many of you, I was surprised at his approach. Obama was the one who went out there and said, “Make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot”; if he believes what he said, then voters just delivered a convincing message that they don’t like his policies.  No one reasonable expected the president to grovel, but it seemed reasonable to think that he’d seek whatever narrow ground he and Republicans can share.

Progressives have long said that Obama made a mistake in 2010 by admitting he took a “shellacking” in those midterms, and by retrenching rather than pushing harder and louder with a bold progressive message.  Those people now seem to have the ear of the president.  After naming some unobjectionable items he hoped to get through in the current session, such as fighting Ebola and curbing ISIS, he offered incoming Republicans the chance to work with him on a higher minimum wage and other longstanding Obama agenda items.

Most notably, of course, he said he would take executive action on immigration by year’s end unless Republicans passed a bill.  It’s certainly a bold negotiating tactic: You can do what I want, or I’ll go ahead and do what I want anyway.  This is how you “negotiate” with a seven-year old, not a Senate Majority Leader.

I’m not sure that isn’t what Obama thinks he’s doing, and I’m sure many of my left-leaning readers are chuckling right now at the comparison.  But Mitch McConnell is not a seven year old; he’s 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, “Elections have consequences.”)  McConnell is not  the proverbial Tea Party extremist who won’t negotiate; he’s an establishment guy, known as a strategist and a tactician, not an ideologue (which is why the Tea Party isn’t that fond of him).  In short, he’s someone who can make deals.  Responding to McConnell’s rather gracious remarks about finding common goals by announcing that you know what the American public wants, and you’re 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.

I wonder if Obama even knows how to negotiate with Republicans.  It’s 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’t even negotiate with his own party; the Senate negotiated his health care bill, and Nancy Pelosi whipped it through the House.

Post 2010, of course, he also hasn’t had much practice negotiating.  I’m not interested in another tedious argument about who did what to whom; whatever the cause and whoever’s 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.

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