Paul Krugman is upset about Obama’s appeasement of the right
The Post says that Obama is going to more or less endorse Bowles-Simpson in his Wednesday talk.
Sigh.
Matt Yglesias joins
Once the President of the United States accepts the premise that it’s reasonable to ask him to make concessions in exchange for an increase in the debt ceiling that both John Boehner and Eric Cantor have conceded is necessary, he’s giving away the game.
Mike Konczal has general disapproval
At the end of last year I wrote a post about how President Obama is bad at losing. I like that conceptual model because the idea that President Obama is bad at losing – that he loses in a way that conflicts his base, concedes too much to his opponents and doesn’t leave liberalism in a better position to fight next round – is robust to many different ideas about the current state of Democratic Party.
I’ll offer some amateur outside the beltway strategery analysis. Given the behavior of the Obama White House, it looks to me like their primary objective is to secure an expansion in the scope of government funded health care by avoiding conflict on all other issues.
This explains the steady even if bloody push to pass the PPACA. It explains the seeming disinterest in meaningful shifts in policy in other areas. It explains why Obama was for the stimulus when it seemed popular and conceded to austerity when it seemed popular.
This is a classic Fabian approach. Avoid engaging the enemy when time is on your side. This also seems like an accurate description of the progressive movements position. While at the moment Progressivism may lose a head-on confrontation, time is indeed on its side. Its opposition is older and grounded in institutions which are losing power. The intellectual base of the right is eroding. Political opinion is solidifying around the notion that there will be some form of universal health care.
As always the Fabian defense is unpopular with hawks, who would prefer that the enemy be engaged and crushed. However, it is successful.
Now as always I think the politics of these big issues is not that important. I suspect that in the end the equilibrium will be determined by fundamentals. However, if you were going to play a pro-progressive political strategy this doesn’t seem like a bad one.
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Tuesday ~ April 12th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
Wonks Anonymous
I’ve heard about the Fabian Society a number of times, but I can’t recall an explanation in their own words of their strategy and its merits. Seems to have been successful, but it’s hard to generalize from a sample size of 1.
Tuesday ~ April 12th, 2011 at 12:55 pm
FillerCrowley
@WA
He’s talking about the Roman general Fabius Maximus.
Tuesday ~ April 12th, 2011 at 6:52 pm
Wonks Anonymous
The Fabian society were named after Fabius for the same reason. And they were a non-revolutionary left movement in a modern English-speaking democracy. So they are an ever more appropriate reference here than Fabius himself.
Tuesday ~ April 12th, 2011 at 1:06 pm
BSE
I agree with you that this is what Obama is trying to do. From a bargaining perspective, however, it seems a very very bad proposition. My model is basically Myerson bargaining, here. Whichever side is best at commiting to insisting on its perfered outcome, that side will get what it wants. In theory the dems have a strong ability to commit, but only if Obama is on board. In particular, Obama could use his veto power to hold over the R’s as a bargaining chip. If I were him, for example, I would threaten to veto any bill that was not scored by the CBO has reducing unemployment. Even if he is actually willing to compromise, then, the plausible threat improves his position in the negotiation. This is especially true if you take the political science literature seriously, since voters will put very low weight on the use of tough procedural approaches, but only on things like growth and also recognizing that it is congress that gets the blame for a shutdown. In other words, this sort of approach is politically viable.
The point I would make is that the R’s have no power to actually repeal the ACA. Their power to defund certain bits of it is not really enough to kill the legislation or its effectiveness. If they could than Obama putting all his power behind defending the ACA might make sense in the long run even if there are costs in the short run. But the R’s can’t… even if the next election goes badly (they’ll certainly still have the filibuster, having failed to take my advice and strip it from the senate rules). So, what’s Obama defending then?
The answer I would give, is that maximizing his (risk-averse) reelection payoff. It’s the only posibility that really makes sense to me. Maximizing his bargaining power means accepting a great of risk which he does not need to take while acquiescing improves his valence: he appears the pragmatic/bipartisan dealmaker to the majority of the electorate (which we assume has some preference for that sort of thing).
Tuesday ~ April 12th, 2011 at 1:14 pm
James Wynn
Karl says “The intellectual base of the right is eroding. Political opinion is solidifying around the notion that there will be some form of universal health care.”
Where do you live? It’s quite an insular place if you haven’t heard of the legal challenges by half the state attorney generals, of Congress’s continued effort to repeal Obamacare, and of the whomping the Democrats take when ever the new health insurance law is made the focus of a campaign (even in Massachusetts).
One thing is true. Obama can lay back to some extent because he knows he has a broad base among the older established media institutions (that are losing audience). If a Republican president had offered a do-nothing plan in February and then two months later declared that he had always been for the (extreme, radical) cuts the opposition enacted (2010) and offered (2011), he’d be laughed out of town. If he had sent his political advisor out to say that he now considered to be a mistake his Senate vote a couple years previously against raising the debt-limit (citing it as a lack of leadership), we’d hear no end to it.
The reason there is so little intellectual base among progressives to erode is that they don’t need it as much.
Tuesday ~ April 12th, 2011 at 4:45 pm
Budget Strategery and Real World Effects | Post Tenebras Lux
[...] at the excellent economics blog Modeled Behavior, Karl Smith wonders if perhaps Obama hasn’t been sandbagging the GOP (he uses the term “Fabian [...]
Tuesday ~ April 12th, 2011 at 8:51 pm
grooft
Problem is that absent a clear distinction between Dems and the GOP around things that matter to the populace, like Medicare, Social Security and Jobs, Jobs, Jobs the Dems will lose the Senate next year and the defunding of government health care will proceed swiftly even if Obama hangs on to win against a wing-nut.
Veto pen might work, for some things, but the key program will be reversed.
A pissed off public might come back with ‘vote the suckers out’ but that won’t get ACA backa. Would another 20 years wandering in search of a health care solution be a likely result?
Wednesday ~ April 13th, 2011 at 10:04 am
Njorl
Fabius Maximus was fighting Hannibal.
Obama isn’t.
Wednesday ~ April 13th, 2011 at 10:15 am
JazzBumpa
I have no model to offer, only observation.
Obama is a pragmatist, rather like Clinton, in the sense that he does not act according to a set of principles, but rather along the lines of whatever he thinks he can accomplish. But – since a set of principles is lacking – the result is incoherent.
Thus, one can concludes that Obama holds fast to ACA because that is his firm desire. OTOH, my read is that, contra James Wynn,. “Obama care” (which is warmed over Romney-care) is pretty popular among the unwashed masses – including small business owners, so that is where he can gain some success, despite the efforts of neanderthal Rethugs at the state level who still will do anything and everything imaginable to make him fail.
Obama’s apparent willingness to give on other issues is not because he is making a trade-off. It is because he is not a progressive, and has no ideological stake in those issues.
Most progressives think Obama compromises with himself before go goes out to compromise with the Rethugs. I think he compromises based on his actual positions, which are right of center. So the result is far right of center.
I look forward to his big talk tonight with dread and anxiety.
JzB
Wednesday ~ April 13th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
James Wynn
“OTOH, my read is that, contra James Wynn,. “Obama care” (which is warmed over Romney-care) is pretty popular among the unwashed masses – including small business owners,”
I imagine the President is quite popular in Massachusetts (re:RomneyCare). But when Republican Scott Brown campaigned as the 51st vote against ObamaCare, he won. That experiment has been repeated elsewhere with more dramatic results. I find small business owners in fact DO NOT like ObamaCare because they know it will result in higher taxes. Additionally, larger businesses apparently have compelling reasons not to like it considering the rate that the Administration is passing out waivers.
Thursday ~ April 14th, 2011 at 1:01 am
Fabian: Focus or Obama: Fabian Progressive | Brucetheeconomist's Blog
[...] Obama: Fabian Progressive Karl Smith Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:43:06 GMT [...]