"Budget Battle Royale": Tom Tomorrow offers a quick refresher course in "negotiation" Barack Obama-style

Tom T settles in at DailyKos

Budget Battle Royale
by TOM TOMORROW

[Don't forget to click the enlarge.]

"Obama frequently points with pride to the role that smaller donors played in his 2008 election, when his campaign also openly discouraged spending by outside organizations. But now Obama finds himself seeking out the kind of big-money donations he has often criticized while encouraging independent groups to raise and spend unlimited money on his behalf."

-- Dan Eggen and Perry Bacon Jr., "Obama reelection campaign
expected to tap big-money donors," in the Washington Post

by Ken

Since Howie has been keep a close watch on the New Republican Majority's bold new, er, policy initiatives at both the federal and the state level, I haven't felt any need to jump in -- or much stomach for talking about these people, who I believe are truly evil (admittedly of several quite different species, but all evil, whether it's the evil of ideological superwackitude or of economic predation, to pick just two of the riper varieties) and are not acting in good faith, and are beyond the reach of reason. In fact, to treat them as if they were sentient beings capable of reason is to fall into their grossest trap. Since there's no possibility of even holding your own under those conditions, you're defeated -- no, routed -- before you begin.

As we've pointed out a number of times, in 2008 candidate Barack Obama had a rare opportunity to bring at least some of the country back into the land of the living, the sane, the functional. With the shambles created by eight years of the economic rape and pillage that passes for "conservative" governance all around us, including the worldwide shambles created by the right-wing slash-and-burn approach to international relations, we had a teachable moment in which a candidate with good communication skills could have undertaken to make sure Americans understood what had happened and why.

For whatever reason, he chose not to. Some said he was persuaded by polls that showed voters were turned off by "divisiveness." Some thought he believed that strongly in forging "consensus." Some, who understood earlier than the rest of us just how conservative he himself is, argued that there really wasn't a deep philosophical divide between him and the failed policies of the Bush regime -- a view that has come to seem more and more plausible since candidate Obama became President Obama. Some of these same people pointed out (and this is an expansion of, rather than an alternative to, this last view) that neither candidate nor President Obama was likely disposed to go on the warpath against the economic elites who are in fact his most important benefactors. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, "importance" in this connection is defined by $$$$$. Come to think of it, these days importance in most connections is defined by $$$$$. (I swear I had written most of this post before I even saw the Washington Post piece from which I've quoted above. We'll come back to it in a moment.)

What has especially horrified a lot of us is the "negotiating" style highlighted above by Tom Tomorrow in his maiden DailyKos "This Modern World" strip), which has become an Obama administration trademark, apparently under the enforcement of, first, former chief of staff "Master Rahm" Emanuel and now of the Master's successor, "Monster Jim" Messina, who has since left the administration to prepare for the just-announced rollout of the Obama reelection campaign. (Is it necessary to point out that the president used Messina's switch from the government to the campaign to double down on Big Corporate sludge, by turning the COS job over to total corporate whore Bill Daley, who scarcely pretends to be anything but the chief government lobbyist for the corporate elites and Big Money?)

If you haven' yet read Ari Berman's Nation exposé of "Monster Jim" ("Jim Messina, Obama's Enforcer"), and you want to get a glimpse of how government by the elites and for the elites actually works (as I mention occasionally, I'm a "nuts 'n' bolts" kind of guy -- I like to see how this stuff is actually done), and if you've got a really strong stomach, you need to read the piece. It's true that we were already hearing that Monster Jim was at least as bad as Master Rahm, if not worse, when he was still the Master's deputy, and so there's not much in Ari's piece that's likely to be really surprising, unless you count the jaw-dropping flagrantness and shamelessness of the pandering. Still, that doesn't make any of it any less shocking or appalling.

A close second to the administration's appalling concept of political negotiating is its stunning ineptitude with regard to political messaging. Has there ever been an administration that occasioned more regular use of the phrases "tin ear" and "tone deaf"? The White House has been turned over so overwhelmingly to servants of the corporate elite that nobody on the inside in any position of authority seems to have the slightest inkling how its actions and rhetoric "play" to less privileged Americans.

A telling bit from Ari Berman's piece:

After the 2010 election, Messina spoke at the winter meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a group of wealthy progressive funders. He gave two PowerPoint presentations, including one on the administration’s accomplishments -- the stimulus, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, healthcare and financial reform. The other was on what was still to come -- immigration reform, the START treaty, repealing DADT. “Jim, you’re missing a word,” one donor told him during the Q&A.

“What word?” Messina responded.

“The word ‘jobs,’” the donor said.

Given the all-consuming tone-deafness of the people the president listens to, it's hardly surprising that they decided to make him the first declared presidential candidate. If the Republican messaging generals don't have a field day with this, they should be ashamed. Or maybe they don't have to. The appearance is just that awful.

The clear explanation is that the campaign people (read: Monster Jim & Co.) want to get started ASAP on raising that billion dollars we're hearing is the campaign's target. And on the one hand, the emphasis on Big Money is understandable given the reality of American Politics in the Year 2012, now that the Right, abetted by the right-wing hoodlums of the constitution-fucking Supreme Court Campaign for the Involuntary Servitude for the Masses of Unwashed Americans (SCCISMUA), "Smirking John" Roberts, honorary chairman. It seems only too likely that the ghastly Citizens United decision is only a down payment on what the SCCISMUA is prepared to do to ensure that the primary consideration in governing the country will be who's prepared to spend the most to get its way.

On the other hand, a campaign that's only about the money the candidates can raise comes pretty darned close to a reasonable person's worst nightmare.

Now we already knew that the 2012 Obama campaign was going to be radically different from the 2008 one. After all, the Obama inner circle began disowning all elements of the original grass-roots strategy as soon as the Democratic nomination was won, and finished the job as soon as the election was won. While there may well have been people involved in the campaign who envisaged a bottom-up undertaking, it now seems clear that they were dupes as much as the poor saps who were swept up by the aura of the campaign and though it in some measure belonged to them. It didn't, and there won't be any illusion that the 2012 campaign does.

Essentially, as the Obama people dismantled the Democratic Party apparatus and all but forbade any Democratic-brand political operation independent of its own, it became clear that the Obama brain trust didn't want a single dollar being expended anywhere in the country in any way benefiting either Democratic candidates or Democratic positions unless that money was channeled through its political apparatus.

Of course it was fundamentally anti-democratic. Surely there's never been any question about that. The larger point is that it was spectacularly crappy politics. Forget for a moment, for example, how much energy and thuggery the administration devoted to making sure that any health care bill that passed would be crap that served the interests of the economic powers that got to write it, for which the point men were, guess who!, Master Rahm and Monster Jim -- the latter a gift to an unsuspecting nation from his former boss Max Baucus, the man who did so much to ensure that meaningful health care reform would be an impossibility (and whose prerogatives and butt were protected, Ari Berman tells us, by none other than his former aide). Yes, forget all of that, and just consider how politically cretinous it all was.

Master Rahm and Monster Jim operated under the illusion that all they had to do was pass a bill, any bill, the infamous "any bill" strategy. Look how well that worked! They succeeded in ramming through a bill that understandably has no passionate supporters and legions of detractors of every philosophical persuasion, and a bill whose political benefits, whatever they might be, won't kick in until 2014.

Even as a matter of practical methodology, their strategy was crap. First off, as we know, these people consider everyone in the country to the left of them politically, which includes most of the actual Democratic Party, their deadly enemy, and went to almost any length to ridicule and marginalize us (Ari Berman documents this in nauseating specifics), while showing a willingness to give away anything the people to their political right asked for, and more, even though anyone with half a brain knew that those people were never going to give the adminstration any support. Look how well that worked out.

Moreover, the obsession with maintaining rigid, unchallengeable control of all political machinery stripped the administration "strategists" of every possible political ally. \Berman points out:

The administration’s aversion to popular mobilization on behalf of healthcare reform, either by progressive groups or the Obama-aligned Organizing for America (OFA), backfired spectacularly when Tea Party activists organized against the bill in the summer of 2009, catching Democrats off guard. Ever since then, the White House, despite the bill’s eventual passage, has largely been playing defense on healthcare. Says one Democratic operative of Messina: “I hope he’s better at political campaigns than at managing big, important pieces of legislation.”

The best thing Monster Jim has going for him as Obama 2012 campaign manager is the likelihood that they will face as pathetic a challenger as they did in 2008 -- though at that, look how close Young Johnny McCranky came to making a race of it, when logic says he shouldn't have had a claim on more than 10 percent of the vote, the hard-core crazies and the economic royalties who would have stood to profit, literally, from the economic law of the jungle that would have been economic "policy" in a McCranky administration.

Meanwhile, it's safe to assume that the last thing apt to figure in Monster Jim's campaign strategy is giving voters a reason to vote for Democrats, including the president, other than being ever so slightly less worse than the alternative. What shocks me is that for the first time I've had momentary thoughts of sitting that election out. And this is after seeing just how bad a Republican takeover of parts of government can be. Usually in these discussions I'm the one who argues that while there may not be more than a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans, there's still that dime's worth. And sure, I'm aware of all the horrors, including life with a Republican-controlled Senate as well as House, the specter of Supreme Court appointments (not to mention all those federal court vacancies the Obama administration hasn't been able to fill), etc.

Maybe the best we can hope for is to exercise some veto power over those judicial appointments via the much-despised filibuster.

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