Leverage

One thing seems pretty clear, less than a week later: many progressives are going to be let down by the remaining Democrats in Washington over compromises on the Bush Tax Cuts and raising the debt ceiling.

Along with the whole "let's not learn any lessons from the election debacle", there's been a "you better stand for our lefty ideas, or else" line in the sand being drawn that would require "holding firm" on at least letting some of the Bush-era tax cuts expire and not just caving in on raising the debt ceiling without some kind of deal.

"They don't want to negotiate!" - that was the point Rahcel Msddow and a number of other bloggers made about Republicans as Democratic leaders, including the President came out in the weeks leading up to, and just after the election, saying Repub;icans needed to "work with them" to try and find areas of compromise and common ground.

Myself, I'm kinda sympathetic to all sides on this - I believe you can't make real progress without some level of cooperation, and I think Washington is terribly polarized and someone, really, needs to stand up for the idea of finding actual common ground.

But Maddow and others have a point: you can't negotiate without having two sides at a table, and Republicans don;t especially seem in a mood to do more than get their way, or just oppose any liberal idea, or both.

For Democrats to win, then, I think they'll need to absorb two lessons that the public serving sector of the left seems to have utterly lost, over a generation: you can't negotiate with yourself and call that a solution... and you can't force a compromise on your terms without leverage.

And right now, especially on the tax question, I think the left has just no leverage at all to forve a deal.

Leverage, really, is the threat to let something happen in spite of the dire consequences that might follow. I've always loved the old National Lampoon cover from the seventies of "Buy This Magazine, Or We'll Shoot This Dog" since it sort of perfectly, and humorously sums up the empty threat. The dog's probably dead either way, is how I see it.

On the tax issue, it strikes me the Democrats are similarly poised for a threat that has no follow through. The option, after all, is simply to let the tax cuts expire. Returning tax rates to the levels of the Clinton years, for everyone, would possibly be painful, but it would, in January, put the new GOP leadership[ in a bind: reinstating those cuts without paying for them, as happpened at the time Bush pushed them through, wrecks any claim the right has to serious ttempts to lower the federal deficit. Hard line negotiating, then, would be for Democrats to sit down and say"take our compromise, or we just let them expire."

The problem is that raising taxes, or letting taxes go up by doing nothing (don't try too hard to argue that voters will see some crucial distinction; they won't), will absolutely be politically unpopular. Some democrats would pay a high price for doing it. The economy might very well, in the short term, suffer (again, don't argue too hard that it won't; it's likely the tax increase would have to slow even the modest levels of consumer spending that have become the "new normal" of our economy). And it's clear that, on some level, the failure to find a solution prior to the election on these tax cuts affected the outcomes in at least some of the House seats Democrats lost.

I'd love it if Dems somehow learned, in the space of a few weeks or months, to become hardline, no nonsense negotiators, like... well, like the agents in Hollywood who back them. Until you can be Ari on Entourage, using a mix of threats, intimidation, fearmongering, and the occasional deal sweetener to get your way... you got nothing. And the Democratic leadership, really, seems to have less than nothing.

Already, in the days since the election, Democrats have returned to their most painful trait: arguing and negotiating through the newspapers and TV media. Republicans, one might note, have been essentially silent. What's their position on a tax compromise? Really... who knows? Although there's been some public noise on the right about refusing to negotiate, and a hazy generalization that they want all the tax cuts renewed forever, there's been enough wiggle room in the right's public pronouncements to keep lefties off guard. Some think they might accept a time limit. Some think they might be willing to cut out the top 1%. But no one really knows. Meanwhile, "Democratic strageists" and "senior officials close to the Deocratic leaders" give blind quotes laying out every angle of our side's thinking. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

These are the times when even I have to admit I wish we weren't the party that just wanted to hug everybody and hold a group encounter session. Where's the table pounding, do it my way or just get the hell out, anger we need?

The larger point here is one I made before: the tax argument is a lousy discussion for Democrats and they should never have fallen for it in the first place. To his credit, President Obama has tried, limply and painfully, to reframe the discussion as a full debate tyhat ties revenue to spending and overall goals. The media isn't particularly buying it, and conservatives aren't especially engaged with it either. But it could be, at least, a start to a negotiating position. And maybe the leverage here is that the President will buy some sort of temporary extension for an agreement on the debt ceiling. But really... that's a lousy deal, and many liberals won't hesitate to say so. If you want a better deal, folks...let's try and learn the lesson about leverage now... and next time, let's learn to bring some attitude and a willingness ot go to the edge to the negotiating table. Let's not put the "hug it out" part ahead of actually getting what we want.