Negotiating with the end in mind (updated)

One of the critiques we often hear about President Obama is that he is a bad negotiator. Most often, the poutragers suggest that his problem is that his opening bid in negotiations gives too much ground to his opponents and that he could end the process with more on his side of the table if he started out stronger.

That's an interesting perspective given where Republicans find themselves today on the debt ceiling negotiations. They started off as big as it gets. And got their base all riled up. Now, they find themselves having to find some ground that same base is willing to give up in the process. Trouble is - trying to find that ground is splitting the Party in two.

Ross Douthat, conservative columnist for the New York Times, gets it.

For months, Republican leaders used all the tools at their disposal — the anti-spending intensity of their base, the White House’s desire for a deal, the specter of dire consequences if the debt ceiling wasn’t raised — to leverage their way into a favorable position. Despite controlling just one house of Congress, they spent the spring and summer setting the agenda for the country: not whether to cut spending, but how deeply and how fast.

But last week, the Republican offensive suddenly collapsed in disarray. In the space of a few days, a party that once looked capable of pressing the White House into a deal that would have left liberals fuming found itself falling back on two less-palatable options instead: either a procedural gimmick that would try to pin the responsibility for raising the ceiling on President Obama, or a stand on principle that would risk plunging the American economy back into recession.

What went wrong? It turns out that Republicans didn’t have a plan for transitioning from the early phase of a high-stakes political negotiation, when the goal is to draw stark lines and force the other side to move your way, to the late phase, in which the public relations battle becomes crucial and the goal is to make the other side seem unreasonable, intransigent and even a little bit insane.

The only place I'd disagree with Douthat is his assumption that the problem is that Republicans didn't have a plan B. The truth is - they were "controlling the narrative" towards an end they couldn't achieve. In the process, their base got inflamed and now they can't put out that fire.

As an example of how this might have gone for Democrats, lets just imagine what would have happened if President Obama had put the same kind of energy into starting off the health care reform debate campaigning for single payer health care - as so many poutragers suggest. As he got everyone ginned up for that possibility, what do you think would have been their response as he gave ground in the negotiation process on that one? Do you think they would have supported him or called him a traitor for caving on his ideals?

What I've seen President Obama do over and over again is that he doesn't take on a fight unless he thinks he has a good chance at winning. Sure, he takes risks. But they're very calculated to at least have a shot. In other words, he takes his time and does his homework to lay out the strategy for a win. We saw this clearly in how he planned for the mission to take out Osama bin Laden. But when there's no chance for a win, he understands what Mandela did, "quitting [on a lost cause] is leading too." Hence, we see the difference between how fast he's standing on the debt ceiling and why he conceded on something like the public option (which NEVER had 60 votes in the Senate).

The Republicans are losing right now in the current fight because they didn't calculate how to win before they took such an unreasonable position. And the concessions they're going to have to make have sent their base off the deep end (warning, wingnut link). President Obama knows better than to do that to the Democrats. Too bad the poutragers can't understand that.

UPDATE:

Just to drive home the point, here's the headline from CBS News: 71% shun GOP handling of debt crisis. And notice the picture they chose to go with that story - Boehner fuzzy and Cantor focused. That's no accident folks!