Pulping the bully approach to presidential politics, VI

Ezra Klein is replaying that whole paradox of power thing: When Obama comes out for a policy, the GOP will demonize it -- so if Obama wants to get anything done with a GOP House, how can he jump off his shadow?  This time, Klein brings Jon Favreau to bear, affirming the White House's not-at-all-surprising hyper-awareness of this conundrum:

Jonathan Favreau, who in February stepped down as Obama’s chief speechwriter, said that dealing with the Republican Party’s reflexive opposition is a pervasive reality in the White House. “People take a very realistic approach to it,” he said. “They’re not frustrated or upset. It’s more, ‘This is just the way things are and this is how we’ll deal with it.’ The strategy always comes to ‘What gives us the best chance to get something passed?’”

Three professors of false equivalence look at the Obama-Boehner faceoff

The Times' James B. Stewart today interviews three management gurus who think that "getting to yes" in a deficit reduction deal ought to be easy. These men presumably know a good deal about corporate negotiations. But their apparent ignorance of politics -- political dynamics generally, and the battles of the last two years in particular -- is breathtaking.

The three cited experts, William Ury of Harvard, Seth Freeman of Columbia's Stern School, and Daylian Cain of Yale,  collectively assert the following: both sides are taking and have taken maximalist, uncompromising positions; neither allows the other any face-saving outs; and they are not that far apart substantively. Prof. Cain suggests that spending time together socially could make a substantive difference.   All of these assumptions are wrong.

(Un)pulping the bully approach to presidential politics

Early this year, we heard much about the Catch-22 of presidential leadership: that the president's advocacy for a given position guarantees that the opposing party will...oppose it.  Quantified by political scientist Frances Lee, this theory was  voiced to explain Obama's failure to lay out a detailed deficit reduction plan in the SOTU or shortly thereafter by Jacob Lew, Kent Conrad, and Obama himself.

Today, via Mike Allen's Playbook, we have a further endorsement from a GOP Senate aide:

--A Senate Republican leadership aide emails with subject line “Gang of Six”: “Background guidance: The President killed any chance of its success by 1) Embracing it. 2) Hailing the fact that it increases taxes. 3) Saying it mirrors his own plan.”

O Captain! My Captain! Make us all get in the boat together....

Anne Applebaum invites us to imagine "that President Obama had spent the past few weeks denouncing Moammar Gaddafi, using the soaring rhetoric he has deployed in the past." The results would not be pretty:

Had he done all of that, there would certainly be fewer European members of the “coalition of the willing” that has formed, tentatively, to prevent Gaddafi from entering Benghazi: I can’t see the French or the Spanish falling in behind an aggressive-sounding American campaign. There would probably be no Arab coalition members either...

Enthusiasm and soaring rhetoric would also now lock the United States and its allies into an implied set of promises. If we’d compared Gaddafi to Hitler we’d have to eliminate him. If democracy were the only solution in Libya, we’d have to stay in Libya until it was democratic. If Obama had been talking about nothing else for the past three weeks, his entire presidency would be on the line.

Does that mode of "leadership" in response to the Libyan uprising remind you of anything?  Remember all those calls for a Presidential crusade against the structural budget deficit? The urgings that he embrace the Bowles-Simpson plan, or lay out a detailed blueprint of his own in the State of the Union address and/or in his proposed budget? Obama has been quite explicit about why he refrained from doing this:

“If you look at history of how these deals get done, typically it’s not because there’s an Obama plan out there. Its’ because Democrats and Republican are serious about dealing with [these issues] in a serious way,” the president said. “This is not a matter of you go first or I go first,” he said before describing a goal of “everybody…ultimately getting in that boat at the same time so it doesn’t tip over.”

Obama, the bully pulpit, and the battleship

For those of us juiced by the prospect that Obama might make comprehensive tax reform a focal point of the remainder of his term -- kicked off, as eloquently urged by William Galston, by a vision laid out in the upcoming State of the Union address, Matt Yglesias tosses some cold water in the soup ("juiced?" "soup"? -- never mind):

It sounds silly to call for less presidential leadership, but I think the evidence suggests that what’s needed here is actually a very vague and generic endorsement of the concept of tax reform plus some themeless pudding. Frances Lee’s important book Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U. S. Senate argues persuasively that what happens when a president tries to “lead” on an issue like this is that a dynamic of partisan polarization kicks in. What you really need to get tax reform is for some hard-working members of congress from both parties to take the initiative in hammering out a framework and building support on the Hill. If such a thing happens, the White House should of course try to play a constructive role. But jumping all over the issue and a creating a dynamic where tax reform becomes “a key priority for the Obama administration” that opportunists on the right want to kill for the sake of a political win would not be a constructive intervention.

That is food for thought (and I've ordered Lee's book). In rebuttal, I would point out that political vets seem in any case to be assuming that getting a tax overhaul enacted will be at least a three-year process, and that while "polarizing" the debate early by "presidentializing" it may slow that process, doing so may also a) help Obama politically, and b) improve the ultimate outcome, since his approach to revenue-raising, federal spending, and tax burden distribution is far more reality-based than the Republicans'.  Not that I'm saying Yglesias is wrong - who am I to game out political strategy?

I do think that Lee's observations go a long way toward explaining Obama's policymaking approach up to this point, however.  Obama's abdication of bully pulpit "leadership" at key moments has been so pointed that I think there's got to be a method behind it. The battle of the Bush tax cuts is the most recent example. Ever since the news of Obama's deal with the Republican broke, and I took in the list of stimulative goodies for the nonwealthy piled up on Obama's side of the ledger, I've suspected that the president may not have wanted the tax cuts for the top 2% to sunset right now. His silence when effectively invited to promise a veto of any bill extending those cuts has been deafening at least since September 9, when George Stephenopoulos asked him four times, and he demurred four times. Ever since the Republican landslide become a strong likelihood Obama may have been desperate to buy whatever stimulus he could while he could -- and the sunsetting tax cuts were his only currency.