Obama and Clinton: Strategies For Change

It is going to pain me to say this (a lot!), but I think Ron Fournier is actually right about something.

Friends and associates of the former secretary of State, including some who are preparing her for a likely presidential bid, say Clinton obviously will embrace Obama's progressive economic agenda. Middle-class tax cuts, judicial reform, paid sick leave, and free community-college tuition are the sort of policies that Clinton has previously supported—and would certainly push in the future.

Clinton is not worried about being associated with Obama's policies, associates say. Her challenge is to convince voters that, unlike Obama, she can deliver on her promises...

The Clinton team is discussing how to draw a contrast between Obama's leadership skills and hers—without overtly insulting the president.

The assumption behind this kind of strategy is that Clinton will lose if she simply runs on a "third Obama term." I'll leave that one aside for now because Fournier has tapped into the argument she'll likely make.

Way back during the 2008 primary (when the contest was still between Obama, Clinton and Edwards), Mark Schmitt wrote a masterful piece on their different "theories of change." While the GOP strategy of total obstruction was not in view at the time, he did define the status quo as Republican intractability. And then he examined the candidates' approach to overcoming the stalemate that would produce. Here's how he summed it up:

Hillary Clinton's stump speech is built around the speechwriter's rule of three, applied to theories of change: one candidate believes you achieve change by "demanding" it [Edwards], another thinks you "hope for it" [Obama], while she alone knows that you have to "work for it" [Clinton].

That's accurate as a rendering of the candidates' language: Her message of experience and hard work, Obama's language of hope and common purpose, Edwards' insistence that those with power will never give it up willingly.

Schmitt goes on to suggest that simply relying on "hard work" might not be enough.

Any of the three "theories of change" has to be tested not just as a description of the current political situation, but as a tactic for breaking it. Even the non-naive Edwards believes that the structure of power can be broken -- by a large, engaged social movement. Clinton's theory in a sense takes the status quo for granted more than the others, but it's appropriate in certain situations: I imagine her negotiating the fine points of a health care bill, having mastered every lesson from 1993 and every detail, and getting Senators McConnell and Grassley in the room, and them walking out having agreed to something they barely understand. Superior knowledge and diligence can be a tool of power...And while hard work and mastery of details is also indispensable in a president, work alone does not overcome unyielding political opposition. As Karl Rove would say, it's not a "gamechanger."

That description of how Clinton might have handled health care reform negotiations totally reminds me of the deal President Obama made during the attempt to avert a government shutdown over the FY 2011 budget. Initially conservatives went into celebration mode and liberals were incensed that "Obama caved." Eventually Republicans figured out they'd been taken.

So the budget deal is supposed to deliver $38 billion in spending cuts, including $20 billion in cuts to domestic discretionary spending...Based on news accounts, quite a lot of that $20 billion could be phony: $6.2 billion in unspent money for the Census; $2.5 billion of highway funds that couldn’t be spent; $3.5 billion of unused spending authority in a children’s health-care program. Is it possible that Republicans have gone from $61 billion in domestic discretionary savings all the way down to $8 billion?

As for the Edwards theory that the status quo can be broken "by a large, engaged social movement"... President Obama has been there, done that too.

Schmitt outlines what it is that President Obama added to the mix. Something I've called "conciliatory rhetoric as a ruthless strategy."

...perhaps we are being too literal in believing that "hope" and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure. Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved... puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk...

What I find fascinating about his language about unity and cross-partisanship is that it is not premised on finding Republicans who agree with him, but on taking in good faith the language and positions of actual conservatism -- people who don't agree with him....

The reason the conservative power structure has been so dangerous, and is especially dangerous in opposition, is that it can operate almost entirely on bad faith. It thrives on protest, complaint, fear...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.

President Obama has engaged all three theories - hard work, building a social movement, and conciliatory rhetoric - in an attempt to break through Republican obstructionism. For a while, he also tried to build a "common sense caucus." Now he's added his "pen and phone" strategy. In other words, when it comes to change, the President has employed an "all of the above" strategy. None of these things have been unquestionably successful - but they've all had their moments. And in the end, he's managed to accomplish quite a lot.

If Ron Fournier is right and Hillary Clinton wants to show that she can "deliver" in a way that President Obama has not, she's going to have to dig a lot deeper in search of something new. Otherwise it's just empty rhetoric that would come back to haunt her once she's in office.

The pen and phone strategy

Over the last few years I've written about the various strategies President Obama has employed to deal with Republican obstructionism. As has been well documented, on the day the President was inaugurated in 2009, Republican leaders met to develop an opposition strategy. The one they decided on was to simply oppose anything and everything he tried to do - regardless of whether it included things they'd supported in the past.

Initially the President's response was to enlist conciliatory rhetoric as a ruthless strategy. The best description I've found of that came from 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.

President Obama demonstrated that he was open to Republican ideas and invited them to the table to develop solutions to the challenges we face. This meant that he increasingly absorbed any pragmatic policies the Republicans had previously held and - in order to continue their obstruction - they had to paint themselves into an increasingly extremist corner.

Eventually on some issues a few Republicans became uncomfortable with those ideological extremes and started breaking away. That's when the President began to employ a strategy to develop a common sense caucus. That worked to get immigration reform through the Senate and created the possibility for a bi-partisan budget bill to be passed early this year after the extremists shut down the government.

And now comes the "pen and phone" strategy. Basically what President Obama is saying is that if Republicans won't work with him, he'll find the power to make changes via other means. The "pen" refers to his executive authority and the "phone" is all about marshaling the business community, nonprofits, state and local governments, etc. to do what Congress will not do. Recently I wrote about the innovation of working with the business community to achieve his goals in both foreign and domestic policy. Today Dan Pfeiffer wrote about the pen and phone strategy and highlighted how it is working on the issue of raising the minimum wage.

The best example of the president's philosophy for governing in a divided Washington is his effort to raise the minimum wage. Last year the president called for raising the minimum wage in the State of the Union. This caught a lot of pundits in Washington by surprise because there hadn't been much discussion of the issue in recent years. The president wanted to put it on the table even though he knew the legislative path was difficult, to say the least. What has happened since that speech is pretty remarkable: The president has launched a national movement to raise wages in this country. To begin with, he signed an executive order to raise wages for people working on new federal contracts. He has also has called on states, cities and businesses to do their part in the absence of Congressional action. And the thing is, folks are listening: From Maryland to Hawaii, states are raising their wages, and from the Gap to Punch Pizza, businesses are doing their part too. The actions that have been taken in just five states this year -- Maryland, Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont and Hawaii -- mean that more than a million workers will see a raise.

But hold onto your hats. Because in the coming months we're going to see President Obama use this strategy on a couple of issues that will spark some fires. First of all, we know that the President has given Speaker Boehner until August to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the House. If he doesn't, Obama will use his pen to sign executive orders that re-prioritize our current deportation policies.

The second use of the pen will happen when the EPA releases their policies governing emissions from existing coal plants. As many have noted, this will be the most important step the President will take in dealing with climate change. And as has been recently reported, rather than leave it up to the EPA to make the announcement, President Obama will do it himself.

What I find fascinating about all this is that the Republican strategy of obstruction is nothing more than a power game. Their intent has always been to strip the President of his power. But perhaps they forgot that he taught classes on the topic of power analysis. President Obama is not about to play the victim and give his away. No matter what they throw at him by way of obstruction, he'll find a way to carry on...doing everything he can to implement the changes we elected him to make.

The current GOP battle is between those who are telling the lie and those who believe it

Nothing that has happened over the last few years illustrates the vacuity of the current Republican Party better than the recent vote on raising the debt ceiling. As you might know, it passed the House primarily with Democratic votes and then went to the Senate. Minority Leader McConnell's plan was to allow it to pass there with only Democratic votes - giving Republicans the cover of claiming that they did not support it. But Sen. Cruz threw a monkey wrench in those plans by insisting on a super majority of 60 votes for passage. That forced McConnell and a few others to actually vote FOR raising the debt ceiling in order to avoid a global economic crisis.

Take a listen to how Sen. Cruz talks about all this to CNN's Dana Bash.

Republican leadership said we want this to pass, but if every senator affirmatively consents to doing it on 51 votes, then we can all cast a vote 'no' and we can go home to our constituents and say we opposed it. And listen, that sort of show vote, that sort of trickery to the constituents is why Congress has a 13 percent approval rating.

I was reminded of how David Roberts talked about the post-truth politics of the Republican Party.

In short, Republicans have mastered post-truth politics. They've realized that their rhetoric doesn't have to bear any connection to their policy agenda. They can go through different slogans, different rationales, different fights, depending on the political landscape of the moment. They need not feel bound by previous slogans, rationales, or fights. They've realized that policy is policy and politics is politics and they can push for the former while waging the latter battle on its own terms. The two have become entirely unmoored.

In other words, Republican politics is based on a policy lie. In this case, they have always known that they have to raise the debt ceiling. But they've lied about it to their constituents for so long that many have come to actually believe what they've said. Sen. Cruz has now become the standard bearer of those that bought the lie.

In the end, this means that the current battle raging in the Republican Party is between those who are telling the lie and those that believe the lie. There is no way for that one to end well because the only way out of that mess is to finally face the truth. At times we see glimmers that a few Republicans are recognizing that reality. Those create the moments President Obama captures with his efforts to build a common sense caucus. But the overall fate of the Republican Party rests on whether or not their leadership is willing to give up the lie. Until they do, Sen. Cruz and the teapublicans will be there to exploit it.

The ground has shifted and the long game is paying off (updated)

Yesterday the ground shifted in our political debate. Did you notice? It all started with Speaker Boehner's weekly press conference.


He not only said the teapublicans had "lost all credibility," he talked about the need for finding "common ground" - something that was repeated by Representatives Ryan and Cantor on the floor of the House later. If you remember, Boehner is the same guy who literally couldn't say the word "compromise" a few years ago.

So its clear that Republican leadership in the House has changed their tune - big time! I'd like to take a few minutes to think about how/why that happened. And rather than do what so many in the media tend to do, lets look at the long game on how we got here rather than simply focus on the recent past.

All of this started in January 2009 when a group of Republicans met to discuss strategy on the evening of Barack Obama's inauguration. Their plan, as we watched it unfold over these last 5 years, was to attempt to discredit the President and the Democrats by simply opposing anything they wanted to do. And so they became the "party of no," operating in a post policy fashion with a stated goal of making Obama a one-term President.

When the Democrats passed the Recovery Act and Obamacare basically without any support from Republicans, they ramped up the fear and paranoia of their base voters with thinly disguised racist dog whistles and fear mongering about Obamacare. Set in a backdrop of the Great Recession, this spurred the birth of the teapublicans and gave them a majority in the House as a result of the midterms. With the filibuster-proof majority in the Senate also gone, the strategy of total obstruction was possible to implement and, minus the ability to actually govern, the Republicans proceeded to regularly hold the country hostage over budget deals in an attempt to force their draconian policies on the country.

In the midst of all this, progressives and pundits had lots of advice for how President Obama should handle the obstruction. Many of the DC village press corp played the false equivalency game and critiqued the President for being aloof - failing to reach out enough to Republicans. What that suggestion failed to take into account is that obstruction was the Republican strategy. No amount of effort from the President was going to change that.

Progressives got angry and wanted the President to do so as well. There were calls for him to "man up" and give the teapublicans a dose of their own medicine. If Obama had followed this advice, it would have entrenched the battle. The American public, observing such a scene would have been justified in blaming both sides, saying "a pox on both your houses" and disengaging even further.

Anyone who has watched Barack Obama or read what he's written over the years knows that he would not take either form of advice. Here's James Kloppenberg making that point back in 2010.

...Obama is doing exactly what he said he would do. Perhaps the critics should read—or reread—the president’s own books...

Almost everything you need to know about Obama is there on the printed page. In contrast to the charges coming now from right and left, Obama is neither a rigid ideologue nor a spineless wimp. The Obama who wrote Dreams and Audacity stands in a long tradition of American reform, wary of absolutes and universals, and committed to a Christian tradition that prizes humility and social service over dogmatic statements of unbending principle. A child of the philosophical pragmatists William James and John Dewey, Obama distrusts pat formulas and prefers experimentation.

Throughout his career, Obama has refused to demonize his opponents. Instead, he has sought them out and listened to them. He has tried to understand how they think and why they see the world as they do. His mother encouraged this sense of empathy, and it’s a lesson Obama learned well. Since January 2009, Obama has watched his efforts at reconciliation, experimentation, and -consensus--building bounce off the hard surfaces of political self-interest and entrenched partisanship, but there is no reason to think he will abandon that strategy now. He knows that disagreement is a vital part of the American fabric, and that our differences are neither shallow nor trivial.

So, what course did President Obama take to deal with Republican obstruction? As is typical, he played the long game. First of all, he reached out to Republicans...repeatedly...in an attempt to find that common ground. As his efforts were rebuffed, the Republicans had no choice but to become more and more extremist in their response, fueling their angry, fearful, racist base to compensate. This is what I've often called conciliatory rhetoric as a ruthless strategy.

Finally, as some Republicans began to wake up to how much this extremism was hurting them, President Obama switched gears and started working on building a common sense caucus to invite a minority of Republicans to work with him in finding that common ground.

Yesterday, even Speaker Boehner demonstrated that he's had enough with the extremists. The end result is that last night, the House passed a bi-partisan budget bill with 169 Republican votes and 164 Democratic votes - no hostage-taking required. The teapublicans were limited to 62.

We'll have to wait and see how this plays out with Boehner in the future. But for once, I hope the teapublican cheerleader Erick Erickson is right. He's predicting this is all a set-up for Boehner to pass comprehensive immigration reform. And...we're off to the races!

Let me end by saying that none of this means that we're moving into some kind of utopia where Republicans sign on to a liberal agenda. The battles ahead will be fierce. What it does mean is two things: first of all, the strategy of total obstruction has been compromised and secondly, Charles Krauthammer's worst nightmare is in the process of coming true.

He’s [Obama's] been using this, and I must say with great skill–-and ruthless skill and success–to fracture and basically shatter the Republican opposition… His objective from the very beginning was to break the will of the Republicans in the House, and to create an internal civil war. And he’s done that.

Way to go, Mr. President!

UPDATE: To be clear, I think Brian Beutler is right in downplaying the policy implications of this change.

Boehner’s always done what the professional right wants except when the right’s strategic and self-serving objectives would prove substantively and politically calamitous.

That's why I said that the political battles ahead would continue to be fierce. But what's important to note is that those calamitous strategic objectives (ie, total obstruction and hostage-taking) have not just been the purview of the "professional right" (read: teapublicans) over the last 5 years. They have been the adopted strategy of the Republican Party from top to bottom. So what's important to note is the strategy (rather than the policy) break. It means the battles will be played on a different terrain going forward and the Republican civil war that has been engaged will be a big part of that terrain.

President Obama's "common sense caucus" is working

About 9 months ago, media pundits had some fun ridiculing President Obama for what they called his "charm offensive." Their spin on it was that this President - who they describe as distant and removed in his relationships with Congress - was finally trying to turn over a new leaf in an attempt to win them over. Of course at the same time, most of them declared that this charm offensive was a waste of time because Republicans would never vote for anything he supported.

What those pundits missed was that President Obama wasn't trying to "charm" all Republicans in Congress. His goal was to develop a "common sense caucus" that could break the log jam created by the teapublicans. Here's how he described it:

So there is a caucus of common sense up on Capitol Hill. It’s just -- it’s a silent group right now, and we want to make sure that their voices start getting heard.

In the coming days and in the coming weeks I’m going to keep on reaching out to them, both individually and as groups of senators or members of the House, and say to them, let’s fix this -- not just for a month or two, but for years to come.

When it comes to the federal budget, the rallying point for the common sense caucus is that they all want to mitigate the sequester cuts that are the result of the Budget Control Act of 2011. You might recall that back then the Republicans were holding the "good faith and credit of the United States" hostage. To end the standoff, President Obama insisted that any deal that cut spending would do so equally from defense as well as domestic programs but protect entitlements.

Those sequester cuts to defense spending are what has brought Republican hawks to the table in negotiating the budget deal announced yesterday by Senator Patty Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan. While pundits assume erroneously that this deal will never pass the House (Boehner will once again discard the Hastert Rule, pass it with a bipartisan vote, and further marginalize the teapublicans), we're likely to hear some of the purity left complain about it.

But this budget deal protects three priorities that have come to be President Obama's bottom line in these negotiations:

1. Protect Obamacare
2. No changes to entitlements without new revenue
3. Sequester effects shared equally between defense and domestic programs

Now that the President and Democrats have shown that they're willing to let the Republicans shut down the government in defense of Obamacare, the deal affirms that in any negotiation you have to give some to get some. While that sounds like common sense to most of us, it is a big step forward in ending the Republican position of "give us what we want or we'll blow the place up." In other words, the common sense caucus could lead us back to actual democratic governance.

President Obama's common sense caucus is beginning to materialize

I'm wondering if our political memories are capable of reaching back to recall what was happening about four months ago. Back then President Obama was engaged in what most of the media called a "charm offensive" that they were sure was doomed to fail.

Of course those predictions failed to consider the fact that the President tends to play a long game in politics and so the chatter about it was dropped because the village can't contemplate a strategy that doesn't produce profound and immediate results.

But some of us actually paid attention to what the President was saying and knew he was working on building a common sense caucus.

I do know that there are Republicans in Congress who privately, at least, say that they would rather close tax loopholes than let these cuts go through. I know that there are Democrats who’d rather do smart entitlement reform than let these cuts go through. So there is a caucus of common sense up on Capitol Hill. It’s just -- it’s a silent group right now, and we want to make sure that their voices start getting heard.

In the coming days and in the coming weeks I’m going to keep on reaching out to them, both individually and as groups of senators or members of the House, and say to them, let’s fix this -- not just for a month or two, but for years to come.

That was way back in March. Now, a little over halfway through July we've seen that common sense caucus pass bi-partisan comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate, break Sen. McConnell's hold on the obstruction of presidential nominees via filibuster, and continue talks about a budget deal. Greg Sargent does a good job of describing what's happening even though he calls it a "compromise caucus" - I suppose to avoid tying it to an actual strategy being implemented by President Obama.

The result of this work is that BooMan is right - the Republicans are in disarray. And their purists are going to continue to give both McConnell and Boehner hell in the months to come.

But - the lefty purist asks - why should the Republicans have all the fun? Its true, some of them aligned with tea partiers in an attempt to "kill the bill" during the battle over health care reform. And we watched them #StandWithRand over his ridiculous filibuster. So should it surprise us that they are siding with the lunatic caucus to try to stop immigration reform? Or that they are blatantly promoting the idea of joining with the tea party to stop a budget deal?

The way to stop this is to get enough Democrats in the House to join with the Tea Partiers so they cannot get a majority. It's got to be done.

Lets be clear. There are purists on both the left and the right who think "compromise" is a dirty word and want to stop any real governing from taking place. President Obama has been dealing with this for 4 1/2 years now. That's why he's placing his bet on developing a common sense caucus.

The long game on post-partisanship

Let's pretend like you were elected President of the United States of America based mostly on rhetoric like this:


Now let's assume that immediately after your inauguration, you learn that the Republicans have decided to use this against you and are going to oppose anything you try to do - not simply when they disagree, but even when they might otherwise support your proposals on principle.

How would you proceed to try to "change the culture of Washington?"

You could - as many partisans suggested - dig in your heels and further entrench the partisan warfare. I suspect that's exactly what the Republicans were hoping for. Their job of painting your presidency as that of a soshulist Kenyan Muslim would have actually been much easier under those circumstances.

But no. You decided to stick with it and no matter what the issue being confronted - you reached out to try to compromise and find common ground with your opponents. That left them with a dilemma...to continue their "total obstruction all the time" they had to paint themselves into an ever more extremist corner and fan the flames of their ever-shrinking lunatic base. To actually appear to be working with the soshulist Kenyan Muslim would be anathema.

Based on this strategy you handily won re-election and gained seats in both the House and Senate. The Republicans tried a "rebranding" that failed completely and then started to fabricate scandals that went nowhere. Nothing seemed to be working for them and the harder they spun, the farther they fell in the eyes of the American people.

A few members of the opposition saw where all of this was headed and started to get worried. And so you launched a "charm offensive" (that's what the media called it anyways) to try to develop a common sense caucus. Pretty soon your former opponent for the presidency was calling out the lunatics on the Senate floor and agreeing with you on some major policy initiatives. And the 1996 GOP presidential candidate said that the Republican Party "ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says 'closed for repairs' until New Year’s Day next year — and spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas." Ouch!

No one knows exactly how all this will end. But at this point you know that the Republicans still have only two choices: (1) work with you on finding common sense solutions, or (2) die as a party. That's the reality you have created. As Mark Schmitt explained several years ago:

...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.

And so ultimately, this very long game of changing the culture of Washington is still underway. You know that you've set the table for a "win" on this one either way - even if some of the folks still caught up in the past can't see it - because you keep your eye on the prize and don't listen to the noise.

Signs of success for President Obama's long game

I can't help but notice that scandal mania just might be dying as news of success on several fronts of President Obama's long game emerge. A few examples will follow.

Perhaps you've heard that both Oregon and now California are seeing great news when it comes to health insurance costs as they finalize the exchanges established by Obamacare. You'll not want to miss what Matt Yglesias wrote about this. It will come in handy when Republicans try to ramp up their campaign against the law's implementation.

...the aspirations of the law are quite high, and the status quo quite bad. That means any time the situation improves but doesn't improve as much as the Obama administration wanted things to improve, that will tend to be covered as "bad news for ObamaCare". That tendency will be reenforced because Republicans will be eager to trumpet ObamaCare's shortcomings (to make Obama look bad) and advocates for the poor will also be eager to trumpet ObamaCare's shortcomings (to build pressure for improvement).

That last statement strikes me as an important point to keep in mind on how liberals tend to shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to our messaging about the policies of good government.

And then there is this tweet by Brian Beutler that is 100% on point.

If California can get Obamacare right, I think it's game over for its would-be saboteurs bit.ly/19aix16
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) May 24, 2013

Secondly, remember a few weeks ago when everyone was predicting the sure doom of President Obama's "charm offensive?" My preference for talking about what he was up to was to use the President's own words and call it an effort to develop a "common sense caucus." Well, it looks like with an assist from the Senate's lunatic caucus, his efforts are paying off.

A tea party rebellion by several U.S. senators blocking progress on the federal budget may be working for them, but not for their fellow Republican lawmakers -- even ones who mostly agree with them...

The debate intensified Wednesday, when McCain charged that the tea party members' opposition amounted to distrust of the House GOP leadership. And Cruz admitted it did. "Let me be clear. I don't trust the Republicans," he said, lumping them in with Democrats...

But McCain has held his ground, suggesting on Thursday that senators who object to conference negotiations don't understand "how business has been done" in Congress. Moreover, McCain asserted that most GOP senators agree with him that it's time to stop stalling and go to conference.

Most senators asked by The Huffington Post said they do agree with McCain.

Finally, when it comes to ending the indefinite war, President Obama is actually walking his talk. I've mentioned before that there has been a steep decline in the number of drone strikes recently. But sometimes it helps to have a visual. Here's one showing the number in Pakistan from BBC News.

Michael Cohen at The Guardian has more - not just on the reduction in the number of strikes, but on the fact that the number of civilian casualties has been dramatically reduced.

Not only have drone strikes decreased, but so too have the number of civilians killed – and dramatically so.

This conclusion comes not from Obama administration apologists but rather, Chris Woods, whose research has served as the empirical basis for the harshest attacks on the Obama Administration's drone policy...

When I spoke with Woods last month, he said that a fairly clear pattern has emerged over the past year – far fewer civilians are dying from drones. "For those who are opposed to drone strikes," says Woods there is historical merit to the charge of significant civilian deaths, "but from a contemporary standpoint the numbers just aren't there."...

So how does one explain this rather important shift in the US drone war?

The reasons appear to be three-fold. First, as technology has improved so too have the capabilities of drone operators to be more precise. Second, there appears to be shift in targeting, particularly away from so-called "signature strikes" that rely more on behavior than specific intelligence to justify kills...

But there's a third reason: as the war in Afghanistan has begun to wind down the use of drones against militants across the border from Pakistan has declined as well.

The "signature strikes" are the one's that have been carried out by the CIA. Eliminating them has been part of John Brennan's policy to end their involvement in the use of drones. And here's what President Obama said yesterday about the third point.

In the Afghan war theater, we must -- and will -- continue to support our troops until the transition is complete at the end of 2014. And that means we will continue to take strikes against high value al Qaeda targets, but also against forces that are massing to support attacks on coalition forces. But by the end of 2014, we will no longer have the same need for force protection, and the progress we’ve made against core al Qaeda will reduce the need for unmanned strikes.

All that amounts to a whole lot of "win" for President Obama's long game. It explains pretty well why I'm proud to call myself an Obamabot!