In order to have a successful negotiation, each side needs to come away from the deal having had their needs satisfied.

What the President does not seem to understand is that the Republican politicians need to be able to tell their supporters that they came away from the deal making a huge cutback in what President Obama originally wanted.

If the President starts out proposing what the Republicans will accept, he robs them of being able to satisfy one of their primary needs from any negotiation.

Knowing what the President wants for a bottom line, he has to propose enough extra so that the Republicans can satisfy their need to cut it back.

This is not arcane psychology at all.  On a much smaller scale we have all probably been involved in a similar situation on a much smaller scale.  When you try to sell a valuable used item such as a car or a house, you need to take into consideration the need of the buyer to feel that they were tough negotiators and successfully got the price down to somewhat lower than what you asked.  (New car salesman understand this very well.)

You may say, “I am not going to play that game, I’ll just set the price low enough that it is fair and it will sell quickly.”  No matter what you do, the buyers are always going to assume that you have padded the price to put in some negotiating room. If you set the price at your bottom line, the potential buyers are going to be very unhappy that they can’t get any concessions from you.  You may fail to sell the house at your reasonable asking price.  If you had taken the psychology of buying and selling into account, you would have asked enough above your bottom line to make the buyer go away happy that he or she knocked a sufficient amount off your initial price.  You could have walked away with a sale that made the buyer and the seller very happy if you had only understood the needs of the other side.

If the President cannot see this, then he is doomed to never make the sale.  Or if he does make the sale, he will have to lower his price far below where he wanted it to end up.  In any case, he won’t arrive at a negotiation where both sides go away happy.

I have rethought going through with a campaign to help get the President’s jobs plan enacted as is.

From John Kerry’s web page:

Feedback on Our Budget

Recently, John Kerry asked constituents for their thoughts on how to combine long-term fiscal discipline in Washington with job-creating policies now. He set up a special contact form for you to share your thoughts with him. Follow this link to send in your thoughts!

I used the link to send him the following message:

The President’s plan is better than I expected, but it is still inadequate.

The people who say I should compromise say that I shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I have now realized that you and President Obama are allowing the expedient be the enemy of the adequate.

Another failure of an inadequate plan will kill the idea of Keynesian Stimulus for a generation.

Don’t you and President Obama do to the Democratic Party what Herbert Hoover did to the Republicans.

Beef up Obama’s plan before you have to vote No on it.

I used Senator Scott Brown’s contact web page to inform him of what I told Senator Kerry.

Think of this analogy. When you take anti-biotics to kill an infection, the doctor tells you to take the full dose even if the infection seems to go away before the dose is complete. If you don’t do that, you run the risk of leaving behind the bacteria that were able to survive the initial dose of anti-biotic.  Not only have you left survivors, but you have killed off the bacteria with which they used to have to compete.  Now the remnants are free to multiply and mutate without the control of the bacteria you did manage to kill off.  These survivors of the initial dose are the most likely to mutate into a strain that can survive even the strongest and most prolonged dose of that particular anti-biotic, making that anti-biotic useless in the future.  This is the history of the continuing need to come up with new anti-biotics.

If we allow the country to go on an incomplete dose of economic stimulus, what will be left in the aftermath may be worse than had we applied no stimulus at all.  We might have a depression so bad and a political climate so mutated that no attempt to fix the problem with Keynesian stimulus will work.  If the Democrats just walk away from the deal and make no attempt to fix the problem, we might be able to fix it later with an economy and political climate that has not grown resistant to Keynesian stimulus.

I’ll let my doctor cousins tell me if I am off base on this analogy.  Would Obama without his inadequate program be following the Hippocratic oath to first do no harm?

The article Economists Say Obama Plan Would Create Jobs, But … claims the following:

Economists cautioned that it wouldn’t shift the nation’s business gears into overdrive, and it offers only modest benefits, given the headwinds the economy faces from a moribund housing sector and growing financial turmoil in Europe.

This together with what Robert Reich pointed out in his article that I reference in my like named post Two Cheers And One Jeer for The American Jobs Act:

That’s been the heart of Obama’s dilemma. Big and bold enough to make a difference, and Republicans are certain to reject it. Small and focused on tax cuts, and maybe Republicans will bite. But even if they sign on, what’s the point of the exercise if it won’t have a measurable effect on jobs and growth?

It would be nice to know what plan Obama thinks is necessary to get the economy moving again compared to the plan he thought he was forced to present to get it by the Republicans.  Since almost nothing he presents will be accepted by the Republicans, he has just negotiated with himself again to lower his initial request.  When will he ask for what he really wants and then some, before he starts negotiating his plans away?

Or as Reich suggested:

The President would have done better with a plan that was big enough to make a real difference. And then, when Republicans rejected it, campaign on it.

Better in that his future path would not be cut off by the claim that this isn’t any better than his previous stimulus which was not as successful as predicted.  The opposition will not be anxious to point out that the plan was watered down from what he really wanted because of their intransigence which was intended to make his plan fail.  Every time he accepts a watered down plan that fails, he drives another nail in the coffin of rational economic planning.  If he really wants to bury Keynesian Economics for a century, he should keep this up until he is thrown out of office.

So the problem is not just the damage that he is doing to the present economy and his own political fate that gets us so angry.  The problem is the political obstacles that Obama is building for a future, more competent, progressive President.  That is if such a President could ever get elected after Obama’s performance.

Just as Herbert Hoover was the President who is remembered as having set the stage for the Republicans to lose power for a generation, President Obama could do the same thing for the Democrats.  And people wonder why we progressives can’t have a little more patience with Obama.

When the calmer thinkers say, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”, maybe we are thinking the “Don’t let the politically expedient be the enemy of the barely sufficient.”

I have gone back and extracted the statements that President Obama made that drew applause from Vice President Biden, but not from Speaker Boehner. Just a couple of these show tepid applause from Boehner versus a standing ovation from Biden. Many of these would make good campaign spots for the Democrats and for President Obama. When I say campaign, I am not talking about just an election campaign, I am talking about a campaign to get the Jobs Bill passed by Congress.

If you have any influence on the campaign or want to promote any one of these ideas, feel free to pass any one of them or all of them on or repost them. Since all of these videos are on YouTube, you can embed them in your own commentary or even remix them.

Full Speech: Obama Prods Congress to Pass $450B Jobs Package ‘Right Away’ has the entire speech from which these sound bites were taken.

If you don’t have the time to view Full Speech: Obama Prods Congress to Pass $450B Jobs Package ‘Right Away’, then the video below is just for you.

The post of the full speech has links to extracted sound bites that would make good campaign ads for the Democrats and the President. I don’t mean only election campaign either. I mean the campaign to get the Jobs Bill passed.

If you have already put this issue aside, congratulations and read no further.

In his article Let’s Cancel 9/11, Tom Engelhardt starts asking some questions that need to be asked.

Ask yourself this: ten years into the post-9/11 era, haven’t we had enough of ourselves?  If we have any respect for history or humanity or decency left, isn’t it time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, to remove 9/11 from our collective consciousness?  No more invocations of those attacks to explain otherwise inexplicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our oh-so-global war on terror.  No more invocations of 9/11 to keep the Pentagon and the national security state flooded with money.  No more invocations of 9/11 to justify every encroachment on liberty, every new step in the surveillance of Americans, every advance in pat-downs and wand-downs and strip downs that keeps fear high and the homeland security state afloat.

Rather than thinking of ripping off the Band-Aid as a cure, I think of the illness as constant picking at a scab.  In this country we memorialize the sneak attack on us at Pearl Harbor, the blowing up of the Maine (Remember the Maine!), the defeat at the Alamo (Remember the Alamo!) and now we have 9/11.

Is it common in other countries to memorialize incidents of their own victimization?  The Irish remember Bloody Sunday and other cultures remember affronts that happened thousands of years ago. We Jews are taught to always bring up The Holocaust.  Yet, I think it is time to put all of this in its proper place.

In Tom Engelhardt’s column he said,

And surely it’s our duty in this world of loss to remember the dead, those close to us and those more removed who mattered in our national or even planetary lives.  Many of those who loved and were close to the victims of 9/11 are undoubtedly attached to the yearly ceremonies that surround their deceased wives, husbands, lovers, children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters.  For the nightmare of 9/11, they deserve a memorial.  But we don’t.

In the column Setting Their Hair on Fire, Paul Krugman weighs in on the Obama jobs plan.

First things first: I was favorably surprised by the new Obama jobs plan, which is significantly bolder and better than I expected. It’s not nearly as bold as the plan I’d want in an ideal world. But if it actually became law, it would probably make a significant dent in unemployment.

…

Still, the plan would be a lot better than nothing, and some of its measures, which are specifically aimed at providing incentives for hiring, might produce relatively a large employment bang for the buck. As I said, it’s much bolder and better than I expected. President Obama’s hair may not be on fire, but it’s definitely smoking; clearly and gratifyingly, he does grasp how desperate the jobs situation is.

Later, in the article he comments on Mitt Romney’s alternative.

Yes, Mr. Romney has issued a glossy, well-produced “jobs plan,” but it might best be described as 59 bullet points with nothing there — and certainly nothing to justify his assertion, bordering on megalomania, that he would create no fewer than 11 million jobs in four years.

Romney’s plan may border on megalomania, but it is right over the edge into disingenuous.  If he is half the business person he claims to be, if it were his own money, Romney would not be hiring people and investing in new plant and equipment as a result of his own plan.  Until there are more customers than can be satisfied by opening up already closed plants and using already idle equipment, an entrepreneur would just be wasting money to make that sort of investment.  Given Romney’s track record in business, one can be fairly assured that he is entirely aware of this even when he makes his nonsensical proposals and uses ridiculous numbers such as 11 million jobs.  Who will be the first press person to call Romney to task on this?

Robert Reich gives us his opinion of the President’s initiative in his article Two Cheers And One Jeer for The American Jobs Act.

Two cheers for the President and his America’s Jobs Act. Cheer Number One: In presenting it to a joint session of Congress, he sounded as passionate and determined as he’s ever sounded.

Second cheer: He laid out the problem correctly and effectively. He explained why jobs and growth must be the nation’s first priority now — not the federal deficit. The economy is in crisis. People are hurting. So government must act, and act quickly. It’s irresponsible at a time like this to suggest that government should simply close down.

But a jeer because the jobs plan he presented isn’t nearly large enough or bold enough to make a major dent in unemployment, or to restart the economy.

It reminds me of how we used to taunt the food servers in the mess hall in the Army.  They had the rank of Specialist.  We  used to praise them with remarks such as “Good water, Specialist”, or “Good bread, Specialist.”  We used anything that we were pretty sure they had bought instead of cooked.