Sorry Guys, but Obama's Reasonableness Strategy Worked

President Barack Obama, a Democrat, recently released a budget proposal which included certain benefit cuts to Social Security, mostly through the adoption of "chained CPI," a lower measure of inflation that's probably pretty accurate in the general context, though not a great measure of inflation for the elderly. Liberals are not happy. The White House protests that this budget is not meant to be Obama's vision of ideal federal policy, but as a measure designed to get Republican support. (Of course, that ain't goin' well.) A recent Daily Kos post accepts the notion that Obama doesn't himself want to cut Social Security, and concludes that this proposal is probably part of his long-time need to appear reasonable, to give the impression that he's willing to make concessions to the Republicans. But they're still not happy with him, and they question the strategical efficacy of this approach in the past:

It didn't help him last time he bent over backwards to make a deal—the infamous debt ceiling negotiations of 2011.

This is, uh, not true. Yeah, Obama didn't exactly win the debt ceiling negotiations on the policy merits. It may have had bad long-term consequences to admit the legitimacy of using the debt ceiling as a negotiation chip. But the man did get re-elected. In fact, he got re-elected in the wake of an historic shellacking in the midterms and with a mediocre economy (though not, as many have pointed out, an economy bad enough that you'd actually predict defeat for the incumbent based on historical data). It was always my contention that, from the day the House Republicans took their majority on January 3rd, 2011, winning Obama's re-election simply trumped any other strategic goals. And we did it! He won! Now, there's no way to prove that his reasonableness strategy was essential to that winning. But it really feels to me like it helped. By early 2012 Obama had completely defined the Republicans as unreasonable, blind obstructionists who couldn't take "yes" for an answer and couldn't be trusted to govern. He got the media to buy this perception. And it was true! They couldn't take yes for an answer, and they couldn't be trusted to govern. That looks to me like a strategy that succeeded: he defined the opposition in highly negative terms and himself in correspondingly flattering ones, and then he won re-election, a victory by no means assured in advance.

Also, it has always been my contention that it was predictable in advance (i.e., I predicted it in advance) that the Republicans would be unable to take "yes" for an answer. That meant that Obama could keep saying "yes, yes, yes" without actually being in danger of causing any really bad laws to be passed. He could propose things he himself did not want and would never accept, hell, he could propose things that, in his heart of hearts he knew he'd have to veto, because there was no effing way the Republicans would go along with any of them. From a purely pragmatic/utilitarian/strategic perspective, it makes complete sense to pretend, in a pretty Machiavellian way, to be willing to make lots and lots of concessions, because Obama could reasonably know in advance that Republicans would never take yes for an answer, which would both get him off the hook for the bad things he had proposed and make the Republicans look like clowns. He did it, it worked on both counts, and he won his election. That looks like a successful strategy to me.

Now, that doesn't necessarily explain why he's still working the same play, given that he isn't up for re-election any time soon. Maybe he's trying to keep making the Republicans look silly with an eye toward the 2014 midterms; who knows. And I think some of the detailed, tactical critiques of the handling of the 2011 debt ceiling affair are probably valid; I'm by no means convinced that his maneuvering was in all respects optimal. But it's too easy by half to just say that his strategy of deliberately looking reasonable and willing to compromise didn't work. He's still President, right?