Erza Klein on the reality of Governing. You play the hand you're dealt.

If there's one area about Countdown with Keith Olbermann that even I, the affirmed Liberal, can't stand is his propensity for "You're Not Doing It Right" Television.  It's always easier yelling from the cheap seats than actually having to, you know...coach the Team.  Likewise, governing is always easy in theory.  When you get down to the brass tacks of it, when it's your ass on the line (and in the President's case, a lot more than that) it gets a lot harder.

Erza Klein opened a piece today with all the various scenarios that coulda/woulda/shoulda happened over the Tax Cut Deal.  It's hard to imagine the President not getting a similar menu of options. Which would you have chosen? I know I was probably with Krugman more than anything, but I'm at least willing to admit that there were possibly heavy costs to that chosen path. Wonder if he'd be willing to acknowledge them?  I wonder if Keith will have even one guest on that will challenge his already held belief that this was a bad deal (like say...Erza?)

No deal: Paul Krugman made the case for this yesterday. In a "no deal" scenario, Republican demands to extend the tax cuts for high-income earners are met with simple refusals from the Democrats. The two sides can't agree, and the tax cuts expire. This sparks a bitter showdown, with the Republicans blaming Democrats, and vice-versa. It also hurts the economy, as markets both adjust to the idea that taxes might increase and that the two political parties prefer outcomes that neither side likes -- and that the public opposes -- to compromise.

Partial deal: Two months ago, President Obama could've simply issued a veto threat against extending the tax cuts for income over $250,000. Multiple high-profile Republicans had admitted that there was little they could do in that scenario. The tax cuts for the rich would have expired. The rest of the tax cuts would have been extended permanently -- at a much higher total cost to the deficit. But an angry Republican Party wouldn't have cooperated on unemployment benefits, the tax extenders or the payroll tax cut.

Bad deal: Democrats simply get rolled in the negotiations. There's a two- or three-year extension of all the tax cuts, and a short extension of unemployment benefits. That's about it.

Better deal: Democrats get more out of the negotiations. There's a two-year payroll tax cut, and a vote to lift the debt ceiling (which will have to happen in February, anyway). There's also a direct spending component of some kind, probably on infrastructure.

I find ranking these quite difficult. The Partial Deal was the White House's preference, but I think extending the bulk of the tax cuts in perpetuity is bad policy. On the other hand, it's likely to happen anyway. No Deal might take care of that problem, but it's potentially damaging to an economy that remains weak and a market that remains skittish. Better Deal looks good in some ways, but all this money will eventually have to be paid back, so the more you spend, the more deficit reduction you'll have to do later -- and there's no guarantee that the mix of policies we use for deficit reduction will be good.

The reality is that it's hard to judge this deal without knowing the deals that will come after it...

I think we wound up a hair's breadth short of Better Deal. (I don't recall Infrastructure spending being part of this deal, so...)

Wide and varied reactions from...well, you know...various Liberal Pundits and Reporters

Katrina Vanden Heuvel (along with a few of my least favorite Liberals) already has mouthed off in the pages of the Washington Post. You can find her stuff there. Joan Walsh and Roy Seikoff were on with Ed Schultz. (There's a reason I don't listen to his show anymore). I'm waiting for Randi Rhodes and Josh Marshal, who even if they disagree with have a sense of perspective about the deal.

Again, consider the facts and our whipsmart media. We went from the President getting exactly nothing for the Tax Cuts, to the President getting just Unemployment Benefits extended for the Tax Cuts, to the President getting Unemployment Benefits extended plus additional Stimulus (or Stimulus preservation) that will never happen under a Republican Congress.

All he's got to do now is hope it works.

Until then, here's the rest.

Ezra Klein (from yesterday morning, before it all went down):

In other words, rather than paring the tax cuts and the deficit back, they're making both larger. If you're of the mind that the economy needs all the extra help it can get right now -- and you should be -- this is a lot more extra help than anyone expected Republicans and Democrats would agree to give it. And from a political perspective, if you believe that what matters for elections is the economy -- and you should -- then it's worth it for the White House to lose news cycles in 2010 if it means adding jobs by 2012.

That's the policy of the deal. The politics are similarly focused on the next election: Democrats are negotiating toward a two-year extension of the tax cuts. They've rejected a three-year extension. That means the next fight over the tax cuts will be part of the 2012 election. And the White House believes that an improved economy and a bigger deficit will make it much harder for Republicans to support extending tax cuts for the rich. If they try, that gives Democrats both a populist cudgel and a way to take hold of the deficit issue.

The White House's problem is that they handled the politics of this argument so poorly in 2010 that their allies on the Hill don't trust them to do better in 2012. One Senate staffer summed up his reaction to the deal in one word: "Nausea." Another said the deal is fine -- but it was getting hard to trust the White House. "Will they actually have that fight in 2012?" He asked. "They dropped the ball this time around."

Uhh, they weren't the only ones to drop the ball there, Congressional Democrats.


Jonathan Bernstein:

This goes back to Ezra Klein's comment about health care, in which he realized that Republicans could have had achieved practically any substantive policy concerns in exchange for a few votes. The same was true on the other major Democratic priorities.

Understanding the tax cut debate just requires seeing that this is another of the Democrats' big agenda items -- only this time, Republicans are playing for the substance, not the issue. And with both sides having substantive goals that they really care about, and neither having the votes to get there on their own, a deal makes lots of sense. Indeed, seen from this perspective, the eventual deal isn't bad at all for the Democrats; they'll be getting the middle class cuts plus whatever other stimulus and safety net they can bargain for, while the GOP gets, well, the only thing they seem to care about in domestic policy.

Jonathan Chait:

It appears that President Obama got more out of Republicans, in return for extending all the Bush tax cuts, than I expected he would. Of course he also gave up more, agreeing to an extension of a low estate tax rate, which is apparently crucial as an incentive for rich people to, uh, die.

Why were Republicans so flexible? They are willing to deal away a lot if they're getting tax cuts for the rich. President Clinton got Republicans to establish a Childrens' Health Insurance Program in 1997 in return for a capital gains tax cut. Now Obama got a fair amount of stimulus in return for upper-bracket tax cuts. Unfortunately, it tends to be terrible policy. But it's the party's core policy goal, and if you help them attain it they can be surprisingly reasonable.

Jonathan Cohn:

So is this a good deal? Uh, not exactly. Is it a better deal than expected? That depends on what you were expecting and when you expected it.

Here, quickly, are five reasons to like this deal:

1. By adding an extension of unemployment insurance (and a payroll tax holiday to extension of the Bush tax cuts, the deal amounts to a new stimulus—one larger than the Republicans would have supported otherwise. One senior administration official suggested in a briefing call that, given Republican demands, “most people thought it would be impossible” to get such an extension.

2. Purely on policy grounds, permanent extension of any tax cuts is a bad idea. The country can’t afford them. No, you don’t want to raise taxes when the economy is so weak. But you don’t want to deprive the government of revenue permanently when the long-term budget picture is so bleak.

3. Obama gets a chance to look serious and less obstructionist than the Republicans. Americans say they like that.

4. Obama gets to give people a tax break. Americans say they like that too.

5. Obama couldn’t win this fight now, given the lack of will among more conservative Democrats in Congress and his low political standing. This way, he lives to fight another day--hopefully, with a stronger economy and stronger polls to buoy him. Ezra Klein laid out the political calculus this morning. Obama seemed to suggest he was thinking along the same lines when, during his press conference, he vowed to make his case to the American people in 2012. Maybe the Great Explainer will prevail after all.

And here are five reasons to hate this deal:

1. Tax cuts that benefit only very wealthy people are a horrible way to stimulate the economy. They also do a lousy job of addressing human needs at a time of considerable suffering. Obama used to decry these cuts. In fact, once upon a time most people would have thought it impossible that Obama would support such an extension.

2. Yes, permanently extending the tax cuts are a bad idea. But it’s not as if temporarily extending them makes permanent extension less likely. As Paul Krugman wrote today, "if tax-cut blackmail works now, why shouldn’t it work again later?" This was arguably Obama's best and last chance to kill a tax cut that will, over the next decade, starve government of money necessary to run its most important programs.

3. Americans already think Obama is more serious and less obstructionist. Based on the election results, they don't seem to care.

4. Americans already got a tax cut from Obama. Based on the election results, they don't seem to have noticed..

5. Even with the extra stimulus, the economy will likely grow slowly. That means Obama could still be low on political capital in two years. Also, to win a fight like this Obama would have to show the sort of communications skills he hasn’t shown in the last few months. He has utterly failed to frame this issue in a way that helps the Democrats' cause.

How you look at it depends on what you were expecting and when you expected it? Who said that before??

Ezra Klein (since I didn't put it in the terms of the deal post yesterday afternoon):

Most of the money just keeps programs that are currently in effect from expiring, so in some ways, it would be more accurate to say that this money is anti-contractionary rather than stimulative. It's important that the White House doesn't repeat the mistake it made in the original stimulus and overpromise how much this will do for the economy. What you can say about this policy is that, for the moment, it doesn't make things much worse, and it probably makes them a bit better. This is not the government making a major new commitment to the recovery. It's the government not getting in the way, and maybe doing a bit to help, the horribly slow recovery that's happening anyway.

It also, importantly, holds the extensions to two years. The tax cuts for income over $250,000 and the new estate tax rates will expire in 2012. The White House thinks that this'll be a good election issue for them, as it combines a popular, populist stance on taxes with a deficit-reduction message. Whether they're right -- and whether they'll fight in 2012 in the way people hoped they'd fight in 2010 -- remains to be seen. But on a policy level, two-year extensions of bad tax cuts are much preferable to 10-year extensions of bad tax cuts.

And finally, it's something of a hopeful sign: The White House sat in a room with Republicans and Democrats and managed to negotiate an actual compromise. The final deal includes some things that Democrats will like and some things they won't like, and it includes some things Republicans will like and some things they won't like. But it's a deal, and a better one than many -- myself included -- thought they'd reach. These tax cuts were a bit of a special legislative case, as their scheduled expiration forced action, but if you want to be optimistic, this process suggests that the next two years might be a bit more productive than some of us have been predicting.

Media Matter's @EricBoehlert is the winner of Fort McHenry's first Tweet of the day contest!

For which he wins...exactly nothing. Because I didn't know we were having one until I read his tweet.  (Hey, I'm runnin' this blog on a shoestring as it is).

Still, this blog officially recognizes his funny, and at the same time 100% journalistically truthful tweet:

Halperin: Obama has lost support of voter groups that formed his 2008 coalition. Polls: No he hasn't; http://bit.ly/ebv5qt

BOOM! Media Matters has the complete vivisection here.

The Political Carnival: President Obama's announcement of the deal (VIDEO)

First caught by my TwitterFriend @GottaLaff's wonderful website, the Political Carinval:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Ezra has the terms of the deal...

Reprinting the meat of it from: "An imperfect, but not-that-bad, deal on the tax cuts", we have:

1) The Bush tax cuts get extended for two years -- with one ugly surprise: For the next two years, estates up to $5,000,000 will be protected from the estate tax, and the tax rate for the few estates that are taxed will be 35 percent. That's worse than the 2009 estate tax ($3.5 million exemption, 45 percent rate), though better than this year's "no estate tax at all." The difference in expected revenue between the 2009 levels and the compromise levels is $10 billion or so.

2) The refundable tax credits are extended: The Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit and the American Opportunity Tax Credit were all pumped up in the stimulus, but set to expire this year. All of them will be extended. Price tag? $40 billion or so.

3) Unemployment insurance gets extended for 13 months: Most observers -- myself included -- thought the federal boost to unemployment insurance (which allowed jobless workers in states with high levels of unemployment to collect insurance for up to 99 weeks) would lapse. At best, there'd be another two- or three-month extension. In perhaps the most important part of the deal, there's going to be a 13-month extension at a cost of $56 billion.

4) A 2 percent cut in the payroll taxes paid by employees: This is perhaps the most unexpected part of the compromise. Rather than extending the administration's Making Work Pay tax credit for two years, which would've been worth about $60 billion a year, they've agreed to a one-year cut in the payroll taxes paid by employees, which'll raise $120 billion in 2011. That's a much stronger boost over the next year, and of course these tax cuts have a tendency to get extended ...

5) Business expensing: Remember back in September, when the White House announced a proposal to give businesses two years in which they could deduct 100 percent of the cost of new investments? That's in the deal, too. The cost of this is a bit complicated -- it's $30 billion over 10 years, but it works by offering huge tax cuts in the next two years and then paying that back over the next eight. So we're basically trying to shift business investment forward to 2011 and 2012. Over those two years, the tax breaks should be around $200 billion, though because it's a shift rather than a cut, it will have less than $200 billion in impact.

Ezra's reaction is there as well. I think it's a "Meh. Coulda been worse."

Andrew Sullivan's take on the President's Strategy on the Bush Tax Cuts... (Intellectual Dishonesty Edition)

Andrew doubles down by posting this from Dave Weigel:

[Liberals] were promised by Obama -- by every Democratic candidate, really -- that the tax rates would be restored to pay for social programs. They thought they proved in the 1990s that these were fair tax rates under which the economy could grow wildly, and that Bush proved in the 2000s that lower marginal tax rates for the wealthy didn't spur real economic growth. It was an important debate, and they won it. They have polls telling them they won it, and most Americans are find with restoring the top rates. And here's Obama, about to throw the game, affirming the conservative line that tax cuts of any size at any time are good for the economy.

But he isn't. He's saying that he'd prefer to raise taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year, but cannot in this political climate at this particular time. Nothing prevents Obama from sunsetting them in their entirety if he wins re-election on a sturdier economy. And nothing prevents him from campaigning on long-term debt reduction from now on, as a way to restore the confidence that can keep the recovery moving.

It's obvious that President Obama's strategy only matters to Andrew Sullivan so long as it hews to his conservative ideology. Liberals simply don't factor into his thinking, and that's intellectually dishonest.  (Andrew may disagree with us, but we are out there, we do exist, and the President kinda needs us to show up in 2012).

Here's a question for Andrew that Andrew can't answer: If after running on the idea that the elimination of the Bush Tax Cuts was a good thing in 2008 and 2010, and Bush Tax Cuts continue to exist with President Obama's signature on them, how likely are Liberals to trust the President on their repeal in 2012 as a campaign issue?

Andrew Sullivan's take on the President's Strategy on the Bush Tax Cuts...

From The Grand Compromise:

So let's get this straight: at a moment when most acknowledge a fiscal crisis that requires sacrifice on both sides, such sacrifice means the GOP gets its budget-busting non-sunsetting of Bush's tax cuts, and the Dems get to extend unemployment insurance. The former is far more damaging than the latter to fiscal sanity, but both add to spending after an election in which the public allegedly stood up as one to demand fiscal restraint.

Here's why it makes sense for Obama. It certainly helps goose the economy for the next two years, which has got to help him win re-election; if done quickly, it can create room for the new START and repeal of DADT in this Congress; in the next Congress, Obama can focus on long-term debt reduction in the State of the Union, without being mau-maued on tax hikes.

I don't see this as surrender. I see this as Obama's cold-blooded pragmatism. Why is this still news?

All I'll say is that along the terms Andrew Sullivan names, the strategy will probably work. The problem are the terms Andrew doesn't name.

The simple fact of the matter is that a great number of the President's Liberal base (myself included) doesn't like this compromise, even with the caveat that it comes with an extension of Unemployement benefits (which I do like, but I think we should've held 'em up for more).

On top of that, as dear ol' Doctor Dad says, the Tax Cuts are not paid for (i.e., they are not offset with spending cuts) and the Unemployment Extension will be.

But, like with everything else in the Media's view of Obamaworld, that's not necessarily the case. And until its put in stone, speculation isn't warranted. Remember, 48 hours ago, major figures in the media were saying that the Democrats were going to cave on the Tax Cuts issue, getting exactly squadoosh in return.

But to me, this is another case of the President getting blamed a little too much for the ills of our fellow (cough-cough) Democrats. The middle class is important to a huge majority of our caucus...but not 100%, Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, Blance Lincoln, Mark Pryor are among the few that seem willing to screw the deficit over (along with the whole GOP caucus) in order to get a few tax cuts for millionaires.

The (substitute) Fireside chat for December 4th, 2010 (VIDEO)

With the President was away in Afghanistan, the Vice-President stepped in for him and gave the Weekly Address:

Nate Silver looks at the poll that says Scott Brown is in good shape for 2012...

...and basically says not so fast.

I will say this, Scott Brown is going to make the Republicans lives' interesting.  To hold onto that seat, he's going to have to lean a lot more Democratic than he has been so far.

Does this mean that David Brooks "gets it"???

As I live and breathe:

And my problem with the Republican Party right now, including Paul, is that if you offered them 80-20, they say no. If you offered them 90-10, they'd say no. If you offered them 99-1 they'd say no. And that's because we've substituted governance for brokerism, for rigidity that Ronald Regan didn't have.

And to me, this rigidity comes from this polarizing world view that they're a bunch of socialists over there. You know, again, I've spent a lot of time with the president. I've spent a lot of time with the people around him. They're liberals! ... But they're not idiots. And they're not Europeans, and they don't want to be a European welfare state. ... It's American liberalism, and it's not inflexible.

"It's almost as if Republicans say they care about deficit reduction, until they're offered a chance to actually reduce the deficit."

Steve Benen, at his vicious best.

Attention Deficit Hawks!  According to the CBO, the DREAM Act will reduce the Deficit (not by an earth-shattering number), but it save money!

But none of y'all care about that, because Conservatives are fiscal frauds of the first order:

The DREAM Act, which has traditionally enjoyed strong bipartisan support, provides a path to citizenship for these young immigrants -- graduate from high school, get conditional permanent residency status, go to college or serve in the military, and become eligible for citizenship.

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office made the pitch even easier.

On Thursday, CBO estimated the bill would reduce the deficit by $1.4 billion over the next decade. The figure reflects a $1.4 billion increase in on-budget deficits, and a $2.8 billion decrease in off-budget deficits, CBO noted. Only on-budget figures are considered under pay-as-you-go budget rules adopted by the House.

This probably won't change a lot of minds; nearly all Republicans, including those who helped write the DREAM Act, have decided the bill constitutes "amnesty."

That said, the CBO score does bring to mind a fairly consistent trend in recent policy debates. For all of the obsessive attention, especially from the right, focused on reducing the deficit, Republicans have a nasty habit of rejecting ideas that actually help close the budget shortfall.

The Democratic health care reform proposal lowered the deficit ... and Republicans opposed it.

The Democratic student-loan bill lowered the deficit ... and Republicans opposed it.

The Democratic effort to let Bush tax cuts for the rich expire would lower the deficit ... and Republicans oppose it.

The Democratic energy/climate bill would lower the deficit ... and Republicans oppose it.

The Democratic effort to reduce bloated Pentagon spending would lower the deficit ... and most Republicans oppose it.

It's almost as if Republicans say they care about deficit reduction, until they're offered a chance to actually reduce the deficit.

If I didn't know better, I might think GOP officials don't think a deficit-reduction measure "counts" unless it undermines struggling families in some way. That couldn't be, could it?

Putting a thumb in the eye of Liberal Discontent, Part 5 (You always hurt the ones you love)

Ta-Nehisi Coates posted this, specifically refecting on the Black Power Movement. Erza re-posted, with thoughts about the relationship between the "Professional Left" and Obama today. It certainly caught my attention:

Unfortunately, when hope diminishes, the hate is often turned most bitterly toward those who originally built up the hope. In all the speaking that I have done in the United States before varied audiences, including some hostile whites, the only time that I have been booed was one night in a Chicago mass meeting by some young members of the Black Power movement. I went home that night with an ugly feeling. Selfishly I thought of my sufferings and sacrifices over the last twelve years. Why would they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake thinking, I finally came to myself, and I could not for the life of me have less than patience and understanding for those young people.

For twelve years I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not too distant day when they would have freedom, "all, here and now." I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare.

Sound familiar?

Does President Obama have Corporate America by the balls??

Well, Noam Schieber seems to think so, and I think he's got a pretty good argument.

Two weeks after a mid-term election in which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce helped thwart Barack Obama and the Democrats, the group’s CEO, Tom Donohue, gave a speech that read like a doubling down of sorts. “We cannot allow this nation to move from a government of the people to a government of the regulators,”he said. “Regulation is the vehicle by which some seek to control our economy, our businesses, and our lives.” Nor did Donohue leave any doubt about how he intended to prosecute this fight: “The Chamber will mount a vigorous defense and aggressive offense in support of the right to lobby, communicate with voters … and to do so without government harassment or undue restriction.” In other words, Donohue plans to spend gobs more money on lobbyists and ads to undermine Obama.

But, if you look at what Donohue had to say in a less scripted moment, it’s not clear that he and the Chamber feel quite as triumphal as they’d have you believe. Asked about Republicans’ mounting criticism of the Federal Reserve, Donohue sounded positively frustrated. “The Fed has over many, many, many years been particularly helpful to this government and to this country,” he lectured reporters. “We must maintain the independence of the Fed and be very, very careful not to louse that up on Capitol Hill.”

Oops! Having spent tens of millions of dollars defeating Democrats while explicitly touting the Tea Party movement, the Chamber is waking up to the fact that its brand new Congress may be a touch better in theory than in practice. Not only are many recently elected GOPers hostile to the Fed, they also oppose infrastructure spending, corporate subsidies, expanded free trade, and pretty much anything Wall Street favors—all top Chamber priorities.

Which is why the White House shouldn’t be in an especially conciliatory mood when dealing with the Chamber and its allies. Big business may talk a good game these days. But, in a world where the Tea Parties are about to get the keys to the Capitol, Corporate America needs adults like Barack Obama much more than he needs it.

Any article that takes the time to rip Amity Shlaes, minister of information for the country-club-industrial-complex (Noam's words...I only wish they were mine), is okay by me.

It continues on to the key graphs:

If you parse Tom Donohue’s speech, the administration should be sufficiently cowed after the midterms to retreat from key pieces of health care reform, financial reform, and greenhouse-gas regulation in exchange for business support on other issues. Business also wants to extend all the Bush tax cuts and preserve the tax advantage for overseas profits, which the White House opposes.

But it’s actually the administration that now holds the cards. For one thing, the regulations the Chamber is most exercised about also happen to be the most popular. The big banks hate the new consumer financial products agency, but the public strongly supports it. The insurance companies hate not being able to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions; the public can’t wait for that provision to take effect. The Chamber would be foolish to go to war over these issues.

More importantly, corporations are suddenly in a much more precarious position than they were prior to the election. That may be counterintuitive given the Republican gains. But, while it’s tempting to assume that the interests of business overlap perfectly with the interests of the Republican Party, that’s simply not the case. The GOP wants to defeat Democrats at all costs. Big business has to make a more sophisticated calculation: It wants to defeat Democrats, since GOP rule typically means lower taxes and fewer regulations. But, unlike the GOP, the shorter-term costs of achieving this goal matter quite a bit to Corporate America. Republicans might accept a double-dip recession as the price of vanquishing Democrats. But, to most corporate managers, such profit-destroying horrors outweigh the benefits of GOP rule.

For that matter, even GOP rule itself doesn’t look nearly as appealing in the Tea Party era. In addition to opposing big business on some of its top priorities, like infrastructure spending and immigration reform, Tea Party pols are prone to dangerous games of brinkmanship. For example, many are drawing a line on raising the nation’s debt limit, which could create a fiscal crisis, leading to a collapse of the dollar and a surge in interest rates.

During the mid-term campaign, the Chamber breezily dismissed such worries by insisting the Tea Partiers would shed their most extreme positions once in office. "Some of the politics of the Tea Party and legislative practicalities just don't match up," the group’s political director, Bill Miller, told Bloomberg Businessweek in October. But the reality is that the GOP is much more likely to move toward the Tea Party movement than vice versa. That’s because the power of the movement is structural: It has less to do with individual office-holders than with the constant threat of primary challenges against Republicans who drift too far to the center, as occurred this year in Utah, Alaska, Florida, and Delaware.

All of which makes the business community’s greatest source of leverage over Democrats—the threat of ousting them on Election Day—significantly less credible. The more Democrats that Big Business takes out, the closer it comes to consolidating power for the Tea Parties and all the nightmares that entails. If that wasn’t apparent before November 2, it’s almost inescapable now.

The Bargaining Advantages of not giving a @#$%

Via Jonathan Bernstein. In short: if you don't care about policy at all, it makes you rather hard to bargain with:

More to the point is that most Democratic constituency groups have real policy demands, and that they’re very eager to have those demands fulfilled. My sense is that a lot of Republican constituency groups have more symbolic demands.

Therefore, at the end of the day, a lot of Republican constituency groups are willing to go along with an all-or-nothing strategy on most issues, while Democratic constituency groups are perfectly willing to bargain for as much as they can get. Look: if you want universal health care, you are probably willing to settle for moving from 80% coverage to 95% coverage (or whatever the actual numbers are). If you believe that government involvement in health care is unconstitutional, or immoral, or whatever, then there’s not much to bargain over.

President Obama's speech at Bagram Air Base (VIDEO)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Ignore the seemingly worried look on the President's face. MSNBC picked a lousy still-frame.

Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Chait: You can't negoiate with fiscal fraud, Paul Ryan.

Just love hearing hyperactive budget hawk Andrew Sullivan call Paul Ryan out for what he is:

So is this a fiscal emergency or isn't it? And here you have a real distinction between a functioning conservatism and the obstructionist utopianism of the current GOP.

The debt is obviously the most pressing issue at hand; this commission represents the best hope in a long time to tackle it. But it must, according to Ryan, be held hostage in order to repeal a health insurance reform that cuts the deficit, according to the CBO, and that was a signature campaign promise by a president elected in a landslide. The only way realistically to cut the debt now, as Bowles-Simpson recognizes, is to work from the status quo - remember when conservatism meant that, when it gave some weight to what was already established? - not to demand tearing it all up and starting over, let alone also demanding a utopian scheme for Medicare vouchers that has no chance of getting through at any point in the near future.

So let's point out the obvious: Paul Ryan is another fiscal fraud. He has much less interest in practically reducing the debt than posturing as a born-again supply-sider and base-pleaser for the Limbaugh right. He is a veneer of fake earnestness over a vandalistic opposition determined to win back power rather than address the country's urgent fiscal crisis.

And what do you know, his piece was called: Paul Ryan: Fiscal Fraud. Way to lay it out there, chief.

Jonathan Chait (from the opposite end of the aisle) says pretty much the same damn thing:

This is why it's so difficult to negotiate with Paul Ryan. The Affordable Care Act is a serious attempt to reduce medical inflation, which is the largest driver of the long-term federal budget crisis. It may fail, but if it does, it will be because opponents in Congress managed to hamper its cost-saving devices.

Ryan, like many conservatives, prefers to reside in an alternate universe in which the Affordable Care Act is not a budget saver but a massive drain on the federal budget (like, say, the prescription drug entitlement he supported.) The Bowles-Simpson commission examined the issue and sensibly concluded that building up the cost-saving devices in the PPACA would save money, and tearing them down would cost money. Ryan can't accept that. You can negotiate with somebody who has different preferences than you do. But negotiating with somebody who inhabits a different reality is very difficult.

Of course, his piece was called: Why You Can't Negotiate With Paul Ryan.

The knife in your back may not come from the GOP, too often it comes from Congressional Democrats.

Following up on a piece that Greg Sargent wrote yesterday, detailing how Congressional Democrats screwed up in the fight against the Bush Tax Cuts, when the White House thought it was a good idea to hold a vote before the election.

Now, we have Steve Benen writing about one of my faves, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) . On Thursday, Harkin decries the White House's posturing toward a compromise on the Bush Tax Cuts, intimating that it threatens Obama's chances in 2012...

...yet on Wednesday, Harkin championed the idea of a compromise.

My goal here is not to pick on Harkin, a senator I've long admired. The point, though, is that President Obama established the Democratic baseline on tax policy quite a while ago -- permanent cuts for those making less than $250,000; Clinton-era top rates for the wealthy -- and he's stuck to it for nearly two years, including through the election season. The president appears poised to yield to GOP demands now, which is unfortunate, but is largely a reflection of what transpired on Capitol Hill, where Dems chose to stray from the baseline Obama had already set.

In this particular case, we see Harkin on Thursday demanding that Obama fight against the same Republican plan Harkin was open to on Wednesday.

Or put another way, Harkin said on Wednesday that he could support tax breaks for the wealthy, so long as Democrats got something out of the deal. Harkin said a day later that President Obama would be making a grave error supporting tax breaks for the wealthy, no matter what Democrats got out of the deal.

The complete piece is here.

And remember what Greg said yesterday?

My understanding from the reporting I did at the time is that White House officials repeatedly signaled to Dem Congressional leaders that they wanted the vote [on extending only the middle class part of the Bush Tax Cuts] to happen. Nancy Pelosi, too, wanted it to happen. But she and Steny Hoyer ultimately deferred to moderate Dems who feared such a vote would allow Republicans to paint them as tax hikers. Dem leaders also worried that they might lose the vote...

What does all this tell me?

The House and Senate punted on the Bush Tax Cuts in deference to a blue dogs caucus that was scared of a Tax Cuts fight in the middle of an uphill election.

There's an old joke my Dad told me about the Vietnam War. President Johnson said if I voted for Goldwater, I'd get four more years of the Vietnam War. Well, I voted for Goldwater...and I did get four more years of the War.

Get it?

Well, you will in a second.

Blue Dog Democrats were running in a uphill year against a bad economy, where afraid they'd lose their elections if there was a fight over the Bush Tax Cuts. Well, guess what? There was a fight, they helped Congressional Democrats cave...and they lost anyway!!!

And now that Congressional Democrats folded in the face of the Bush Tax Cuts fight, now that they boxed themselves into a corner, and now that they're feeling the heat from their base...they're pointing the finger...at the White House.

So between the Benen article and Greg Sargent's piece its pretty clear. Yeah, we didn't handle the Tax Cut thing well at all, but we'd prefer the White House take all the blame for it.

UPDATE 10:25pm Pacific: Even Brian Beutler, the Reporter who cries "wolf" far too often for my tastes, in a piece echoing Greg Sargent's thinks that the Congressional Dems are hypocrites of the first order:

In the meantime Congressional Dems are furious at the White House for having provided no leadership since the election, only to highjack the issue and (probably) give Republicans just about everything they want. And the White House understandably finds this all highly hypocritical, because these same Congressional Democrats punted back in October when President Obama was pressing them to vote for his tax plan.

But all the finger pointing is really just a diversion from the bigger point that the Democrats aren't really out of options. They're just scared of their own leverage again.

Putting a thumb in the eye of Liberal Discontent, Part 4 (Congress screwed up the Bush Tax cuts, not the White House)

And now we have Greg Sargent:

My understanding from the reporting I did at the time is that White House officials repeatedly signaled to Dem Congressional leaders that they wanted the vote [on extending only the middle class part of the Bush Tax Cuts] to happen. Nancy Pelosi, too, wanted it to happen. But she and Steny Hoyer ultimately deferred to moderate Dems who feared such a vote would allow Republicans to paint them as tax hikers. Dem leaders also worried that they might lose the vote, though it's unclear why this should have mattered: It still would have forced House GOPers to make a tough choice before the election.

It's also key to keep in mind that when the possibility of the vote was still hanging over the elections, Dems were on the offensive. They were winning. As Ezra Klein reminds us, Republicans were clearly caught in a bind. House GOPers like John Boehner and Dave Camp were actually saying they might vote with the Dems. That was a clear signal that Dems held the cards at the time. Yet they punted anyway. Now Republicans are in a stronger position: Dems have been "shellacked," Republicans are no longer facing an election, and the tight timing of the lame-duck session has given the GOP more leverage.

You could argue that the White House could have been more vocal about their desire for a pre-election vote or pushed Dem leaders harder to make it happen. But the White House was right to grant Congressional leaders the leeway to chart their own course. And at a certain point, it's tiresome to hear Dems blame the White House for their own lack of spine or leadership. Amid the roar of criticism of the White House, let's keep in mind that they aren't to blame for a key aspect of the Dems' current predicament.

AP may be just as bad at headline writing as say...I don't know...the Huffington Post.

Here's the AP Headline (posted via Talking Points Memo):

Obama knocks FIFA over 2022 World Cup decision

Wow.  The President went after FIFA.  He knocked them.  He must've said something really strong to garner that kind of headline.

So what did the President say?

"I think it was the wrong decision."

Uhhh...excuse me?

Was that it?

No, I didn't miss anything. That was the whole quote.

"I think it was the wrong decision."

That's a knock?

What did you expect the President of the United States to say? I'm thrilled that Qatar beat us out for our World cup Bid?

AP, rapidily joining Politico as the most full of @#$% News source out there.

Putting a thumb in the eye of Liberal Discontent, Part 3 (Hey, Liberals...SUCK IT UP!)

...and put your big-boy pants on. Again, from Jonathan Bernstein:

Barack Obama is not a king, and you are not a subject. You are a citizen. Act like it. American political parties are extremely permeable: get active. If things don't go your way, get more active. If you've been active, stay in the game. Expect disappointments -- you are one of 300 million, and many of them disagree with you.

Democracy, real democracy, is hard. I've said this before...democracy involves, as Bonnie Honig says, the "inescapability of conflict." Full citizenship, then, means accepting that you're never going to really get your way. You're never going to have the perfect politicians to support. You're never going to have party leaders who "really" represent you in the sense of always doing what you want. Full citizenship means continuing on, nevertheless, because you may be able to get somewhat less partial success if you keep working.

And don't kid yourself -- the other side doesn't get what they want, either. Liberals are frustrated now, and conservatives excited by the results of the recent elections -- but ask any conservative if they're happy about public policy over the last any number of years, and you'll find that George W. Bush wasn't really a conservative, and Trent Lott wasn't really a conservative, and Tom DeLay betrayed conservatives, and Newt Gingrich, and if they're old enough, Ronald Reagan.

It's a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy to believe that one can ever fully win, just as it's an illusion that the other side has ever fully achieved what it wants.

Yes, that's even more the case in a Madisonian system, but it's really fundamental to any kind of democracy. It's not a function of particular institutions. It's a consequence of, well, the human condition, of our fundamental plurality and differences, if I want to go and get all Arendtian on everyone.

So what do citizens do? They don't mope about whether the president they worked so hard to elect is who they hoped he'd be; they keep working. They make choices: they decide whether to put their efforts into House races, Senate contests, the next presidential election, pressure on marginal Members of Congress to vote the "right" way right now. Even knowing the next round will yield its share of disappointments and frustrations.

Citizens, that is, learn what they need to know, and then make choices and act. And win or lose, and then keep acting.