In which Obama publicly negotiates with himself

It's become a cliche that Obama is a poor negotiator because he "negotiates with himself." In his weekly address, he makes it literal. Here's what he says about the budget he's releasing on Wednesday:

This is the compromise I offered the Speaker of the House at the end of last year.  While it’s not my ideal plan to further reduce the deficit, it’s a compromise I’m willing to accept in order to move beyond a cycle of short-term, crisis-driven decision-making, and focus on growing our economy and our middle class for the long run.  It includes ideas many Republicans have said they could accept as well.  It’s a way we can make progress together.

Of course he's willing to accept this compromise, because he proposed it. The Republicans, however, didn't accept it. Putting it on offer now signals that he's willing to accept a new compromise further to the right.

Obama the centrist

It's been a while since I checked in on Obama's weekly address. This week, the headliner is another call on Congress not to play chicken with the debt ceiling -- though based on recent polling, he's going to have to do better to explain to the public that raising the debt ceiling does not authorize new spending (not withstanding that poll's limitations).  A few other tidbits caught my eye, though:

1) While Obama paired job growth and deficit reduction, his emphasis again was on deficit reduction. That's partly a function of his focus on looming budget battles, but he still positions himself as a centrist who cuts spending while investing in the future (infrastructure, education, energy). He also invoked the confidence fairy.

2) When talking about cutting spending while preserving essential investments, Obama does not emphasize preserving Medicare and Social Security.  It's no secret to anyone not in the grip of right-wing paranoia that Obama is open to entitlement reform (though his preferred means of Medicare savings would work by squeezing providers and reducing unnecessary care by ending away from fee-for-service payments). He not only aims to transfer wealth from the wealthy to the poor and middle classes, but also, to some degree,  from the (nonpoor) elderly to children, parents of children, and broadly, "the future", via infrastructure and R&D.

Obama (re) declares war on lobbyists

It's on now. When the Baucus bill passed out of committee, it became clear that some form of health care reform will likely pass. That was the opening gong for lobbyists to start their final pushes to knock key cost control measures off of the end product -- the excise tax on expensive health care plans, the pending Sustainable Growth Rate cut to doctors' Medicare payments, the cuts in subsidies to Medicare Advantage plans, the tax on medical device makers, strong price control leverage for any public option, etc. etc.

The bogus and swiftly discredited (counter-swiftboated?) AHIP-commissioned study purporting to show that the Baucus bill will raise premiums was in turn a red cape to Democrats, who have gone out with gusto to paint the health insurance industry as public enemy #1. It is unlikely that AHIP is trying to prevent a reform bill from passing; they are rather trying to get what they can added in and taken out -- stiffer individual mandates, increased subsidies, no public option, no excise tax, weaker mimimum coverage standards. Give them all that, and reform is still worth doing -- insurance at least marginally worth having will still be made at least marginally affordable to most of those who now lack it. But the U.S. health care system will remain dysfunctional -- twice as expensive as that of other rich countries, riddled with coverage holes, wired for overtreatment. The battle now is about how eviscerated the final bill will be.

That is why Obama has returned to a major campaign theme: we can't reform our policies until we reform our politics. Here's how he put it on Jan. 30, 2008 in Denver:

we need to do more than turn the page on the failed Bush-Cheney policies; we have to turn the page on the politics that helped make those policies possible.

Lobbyists setting an agenda in Washington that feeds the inequality, insecurity, and instability in our economy.

Division and distraction that keeps us from coming together to deal with challenges like health care, and clean energy, and crumbling schools year after year after year.

Cronyism that gave us Katrina instead of competent government. And secrecy that made torture permissible and illegal wiretaps possible.

It's a politics that uses 9/11 to scare up votes; and fear and falsehoods to lead us into a war in Iraq that should've never been authorized and should've never been waged.

Compare his weekly address today:

This [rampant health care inflation] is the unsustainable path we’re on, and it’s the path the insurers want to keep us on. In fact, the insurance industry is rolling out the big guns and breaking open their massive war chest – to marshal their forces for one last fight to save the status quo. They’re filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads. They’re flooding Capitol Hill with lobbyists and campaign contributions. And they’re funding studies designed to mislead the American people.

Of course, like clockwork, we’ve seen folks on cable television who know better, waving these industry-funded studies in the air. We’ve seen industry insiders – and their apologists – citing these studies as proof of claims that just aren’t true. They’ll claim that premiums will go up under reform; but they know that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that reforms will lower premiums in a new insurance exchange while offering consumer protections that will limit out-of-pocket costs and prevent discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. They’ll claim that you’ll have to pay more out of pocket; but they know that this is based on a study that willfully ignores whole sections of the bill, including tax credits and cost savings that will greatly benefit middle class families. Even the authors of one of these studies have now admitted publicly that the insurance companies actually asked them to do an incomplete job.

It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s bogus. And it’s all too familiar. Every time we get close to passing reform, the insurance companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, "Take one of these, and call us in a decade." Well, not this time.

Beyond slamming the most obvious target, Obama at the close broadened the scope and raised the stakes, framing the health reform bill as a test case for the functioning of American democracy:

Last November, the American people went to the polls in historic numbers and demanded change. They wanted a change in our policies; but they also sought a change in our politics: a politics that too often has fallen prey to the lobbyists and the special interests; that has fostered division and sustained the status quo. Passing health insurance reform is a great test of this proposition. Yes, it will make a profound and positive difference in the lives of the American people. But it also now represents something more: whether or not we as a nation are capable of tackling our toughest challenges, if we can serve the national interest despite the unrelenting efforts of the special interests; if we can still do big things in America.

I believe we can. I believe we will. And I urge every member of Congress to stand against the power plays and political ploys – and to stand up on behalf the American people who sent us to Washington to do their business.

Obama here is not only turning the spotlight on lobbyists just as they kick into high gear -- there's also a veiled threat to expose selected targets in Congress (Democrats, since there's no Republican votes except maybe Snowe's) who try to hold the final bill hostage to various giveaways.

It's been said by many that Obama needs to land a punch in a major domestic policy fight. Let's see specifically what he chooses to fight for as health care reform approaches the endgame.

Fireside Chat 2.0: Obama's weekly address

A few days before the election, I celebrated Obama's "ability to present a complex idea in understandable terms - to break it down, to present it as a narrative or a lay down a cause-and-effect chain." He continues to do so in his weekly addresses, posted on Whitehouse.gov.

Today, after defining the stimulus as "only a first step on the road to economic recovery," he lays out a four-part economic agenda to complete that journey -- stemming the tide of foreclosures, getting credit flowing again, reforming a "broken regulatory system," and getting "exploding deficits" under control once the economy begins to recover. Nothing rhetorically remarkable in that outlay. The explanation of how it all fits together, though, is vintage Obama:

No single piece of this broad economic recovery can, by itself, meet the demands that have been placed on us. We can't help people find work or pay their bills unless we unlock credit for families and businesses. We can't solve our housing crisis unless we help people find work so that they can make payments on their homes. We can't produce shared prosperity without firm rules of the road, and we can't generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control. In short, we cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing them all. And that is exactly what the strategy we are pursuing is designed to do.

Anaphora -- the five-times-repeated "we can't do x without y" -- binds a complex cause-and-effect chain together here. The rhetorical effect is to get the listener's buy-in to the whole package, while getting across the staggering array of crises that Obama is proposing to tackle systematically and simultaneously. By appealing to our ability to grasp the causal connections in a complex problem, Obama projects his own ability to do so.