Obama Spent Too Much Time Trying To Reach Out To GOP. A Bloody Stump Was All He Got.

[Jim Lane]

65. "Gullible" is unfair, but he was too optimistic for too long

It started with his first big proposal, the stimulus package. He offered a plan that was far smaller than what liberal economists were calling for. Furthermore, even aside from the question of the overall size, the breakdown was tailored to appeal to the Republicans, with the component of tax cuts being much larger than what liberals recommended. (Targeted spending increases have more stimulus effect, dollar-for-dollar, than tax cuts.)

My recollection is that, when he first rolled out the plan, Republican leaders were pleased with the size of the tax cuts. But the key point is that it didn't matter. The Republicans voted against it anyway -- unanimously in the House and almost unanimously in the Senate.

It's not just hindsight to say that Obama mishandled this. I've never dealt with twelve-figure matters but even in much smaller negotiations, I know that you don't start with your best offer. He should have proposed a much bigger plan that was all or almost all spending, and let the Republicans whittle it down and get some "tax relief" included, as part of a compromise that they would then vote for. That wouldn't have violated the expectations of the American people.

Even if you give Obama a pass on that incident, though, it's harder to deny that he didn't learn enough from it. He persisted in acting as if the Republicans would behave reasonably and responsibly. When it came to the ACA, for example, he loudly insisted on a "robust public option" and then proposed a bill that omitted it. The result this time was even worse in the sense that he got zero Republican votes in either chamber for a watered-down version of a major policy initiative. If he had proposed a public option and seen it eliminated in the course of Congressional dealmaking (which, I admit, is what probably would have happened), voters in the middle would not have seen him as excessively partisan, and his base would have been more motivated.

I'm not saying he should have "steamrolled them" (per Rose Siding in #29). That's pretty much what FDR did, and he won a landslide re-election -- but the makeup of the 111th Congress was such that Obama didn't have that option. My criticism is that, in striking the balance between pushing hard for a progressive agenda versus being willing to compromise, he tilted too far toward the latter, and that he persisted in doing so long after the intensity of Republican obstructionism should have been apparent.