The Economist
Budget brinkmanship in a conservative America
JARED BERNSTEIN, a progressive economist who until recently worked for the vice-president, tells it straight:
If your conclusion is that Democrats got rolled because the President is a lousy negotiator, I disagree. Not on his negotiating skills…as someone said in comments, I wouldn’t want him in the auto showroom with me when I’m bargaining for a better price. I disagree that better negotiating skills would have made a big difference. The problem goes much deeper. ...
The problem for progressives is that not very many Americans are progressive. As Mr Bernstein put it:
Those of us who do care about [progressive programmes] will not defeat those who strive to get rid of it all by becoming better tacticians. We will only find success when a majority of Americans agrees with us that government is something worth fighting for.
There you have it.
Kevin Drum bravely points his finger at the mirror:
... I blame the broad liberal community for our failures, not just President Obama. My biggest beef with Obama is the same one I had three years ago, namely that he's never really even tried to move public opinion in a specifically progressive direction. But that hardly even matters unless all the rest of us have laid the groundwork. And we haven't. Wonks, hacks, activists, all of us. We just haven't persuaded the public to support our vision of government. Until we do, the tea party tendency will always be more powerful than we are.
This morning, Matthew Yglesias noticed a new Pew poll that shows 41% of Americans identifying as "conservative" or "very conservative" and a paltry 21% identifying as "liberal" or "very liberal". It's not a pretty picture for the left:
"Liberals just aren’t the 'base' of the Democratic Party in the same way that conservatives are the base of the GOP", Mr Yglesias observes. The major parties, he notes, "are very asymmetrical in their structure and composition". Quite right.
Putting all this together, I'm not at all ready to concede that the president is a lousy negotiator. "[I]s this the best the nuclear option can get you?" Tyler Cowen asks the tea-party movement. "I’d say rethink your theory of public opinion."
For chart:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/08/debt-ceiling-deal-0
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