NYT: "The Republican Retreat"

Ross Douthart is a conservative columnist for The New York Times, who seems to have retained his sanity along with his conservative credentials. Yesterday, this was the headline for his column: "The Republican Retreat."

The gist is that the Republicans in Congress were is a good position on the debt ceiling negotiations, but they blew the end game -- or, rather, they had no end game.

As I understand his point, they had gained the advantage by not giving an inch on an increase in taxes, which had forced Obama to move their way on spending cuts. Then, all they needed to do was give a little bit on closing some tax loopholes (like ethanol subsidies, or carry-over interest deductions, or even the no-brainer of eliminating tax breaks for corporate jets). And then they would have won the negotiations with all the spending cuts Obama gave in on.

They just needed to play that one more card, timed just right -- but they blew it. They allowed Obama to gain the high ground by portraying himself as the one who had conceded on spending cuts, and they wouldn't give an inch on taxes.

Douthart writes:

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.

Winning the later phase doesn’t require making enormous compromises, or giving up the ground you’ve gained. But it requires at least the appearance of conciliation, and a few examples of concessions that you’re willing to (oh-so-magnanimously) make to those unreasonable ideologues in the other party.

Since they wouldn't even give the appearance of conciliation (either a modest scale-back on spending cuts or a accept closing one of those hard-to-defend tax loopholes), Douthart concludes that Boehner just didn't have the votes in his GOP caucus to accept any compromise. That is the demand the Tea Party makes: they will not yield on their promise to cut spending and refuse any tax increases.

So it looks like the Tea Party anti-tax zealots had their way, and the Republicans wound up with less than they might have gotten with more reasonable negotiations. As Douthart concludes:

. . . both the politics and the substance of such a deal would probably be worse for conservatives than the kind of bargain that might have been available otherwise — if more Republicans had only recognized that sometimes a well-chosen concession can be the better part of valor.

I certainly don't want to get in the way of a conservative criticizing the GOP, but I disagree with Douthart on one thing here. He doesn't give President Obama any credit for being the shrewd negotiator himself. Obama seemed to give in more than I wanted him to, but it looks like in the end, he may come out the winner. By playing the willing-to-compromise card early, he was able to maximize his opponents' intransigence to great advantage.

Not only in these negotiations, but perhaps in the 2012 elections too.

Ralph