Worse than a crime, etc.

In trying to pin the sequester on Obama, Republicans never really say exactly what they're blaming him for. Is it for actually wanting the savage cuts -- a suggestion that doesn't pass the laugh test? Or for being weak or foolish enough to let them inflict it on him and on the country? That must be it -- notwithstanding it doesn't reflect very well on them.  They're the ones insisting that the meat ax is better than a) simply calling the thing off, since no one intended to enact it, or b) replacing it with a mix of more targeted cuts and modest tax hikes.

Ruth Marcus speaks my thought exactly (and I suppose I've more or less reiterated hers):

The Obama administration is guilty of bad negotiating in pursuit of sensible policy. Congressional Republicans are guilty of exploiting the president’s bad negotiating in pursuit of terrible policy.

And yes, Obama, never willing to carry a fight to the finish, gave up his point of maximum leverage:

In which I jump to a conclusion

Jonathan Bernstein jumped in early yesterday with a characteristic caution regarding Susan Rice's withdrawal of herself from consideration for Secretary of State:

I’d caution everyone to wait a bit before drawing any firm conclusions about what happened here. We don’t know she was Barack Obama’s first choice. We don’t know, if she was the top choice, why she didn’t wind up the pick. If outside objections mattered — say, from John McCain — we don’t know which ones mattered, and it’s not necessarily the loudest ones.

It's certainly true that we don't know everything Bernstein says we don't know. Nonetheless, when I saw the news, my own mind jumped to a conclusion simultaneous with processing it: shit, Obama caved. I consider that a significant data point, not because I'm particularly knowledgeable about this process or about Rice, but because I'm not. I think anyone who followed the course of this prospective nomination even casually would have leaped to the same conclusion. And those optics suggest a major White House failure, whatever the merits of Rice as Secretary of State.

Ruth Marcus's false "false false choice" charge

Purporting merely to debunk an irritating and misleading rhetorical device, Ruth Marcus has struck at the heart of Obamaism. Her target is Obama's fondness for what she calls a "false false choice':

The false-choice dodge takes three overlapping forms. The first, a particular Obama specialty, is the false false choice. Set up two unacceptable extremes that no one is seriously advocating and position yourself as the champion of the reasonable middle ground between these unidentified straw men.

I will argue further down that most of the Obama false choice tropes Marcus takes on are valid.  But first I want to spotlight the seriousness of the charge.  The false choice trope is not merely a tool of rhetorical combat. Setting things up this way reflects a core tendency in Obama's personality and approach to problem-solving.