Conciliatory rhetoric as ruthless strategy: Debt ceiling version

Anyone who has been reading here for a while now knows that one of my favorite characterizations of President Obama's style comes from what Jonathan Chait called conciliatory rhetoric as ruthless strategy. In describing what that means, Chait draws on an article about Obama's theory of change written by Mark Schmitt.

One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that's not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists -- it's a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict.

As Chait says:

This apparent paradox is one reason Obama's political identity has eluded easy definition. On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless Chicago politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it's all the same thing. Obama's defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.

The beauty of this kind of strategy is that it sets up a win/win for the one who uses it...either those operating in bad faith join attempts to solve the problem or they are shown to have nothing.

I think we've all seen this strategy used by President Obama over the last few days. At today's press conference, in talking about deficit reduction, he said this:

I might add it is the primary solution that the Republicans have offered when it comes to jobs. They keep on going out there and saying, “Mr. President, what are you doing about jobs?” And when you ask them, well, what would you do? “We’ve got to get government spending under control and we’ve got to get our deficits under control.” So I say, okay, let’s go. Where are they? I mean, this is what they claim would be the single biggest boost to business certainty and confidence. So what's the holdup?

When the poutragers criticize President Obama's attempts at bipartisanship and suggest that he is naive in thinking he can pull it off, what they miss is that its only the initial offer that is directed at attaining bipartisan solutions. If they don't accept the offer, the play becomes for public opinion - demonstrating for all the world to see that there's only one adult in the room.