I can’t find an article to point to that is written by an “authority” that will make the point I want to make. I’ll just have to write it myself.

To start a (political) negotiation, ask for at least as much as what you want. Asking for anything less is the road to failure. The discussion on single-payer health care is the current example that is most important.

It is easiest to discuss this in terms of the failure to negotiate that brought us to Obamacare. Many of the “experts” wanted a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system. Actually, the article Some Experts, Like Krugman, Supported Single Payer Until Bernie Sanders Put It in His Platform provides the evidence.

Apparently the political calculus was that we couldn’t get a single payer system passed into law. So let’s just go for a public option. Surely, even the Republicans couldn’t be against that. It is merely an option that would compete against private insurance. Republicans at least pay lip service to the idea of competition in the free market. Well, the Republicans fought tooth and nail against the public option. The opposition was so fierce that Obama dropped the public option very early in the campaign for health care reform. We didn’t end up with what we wanted, and we were even afraid to fight for our fall-back position.

So, to me, the lesson learned is not to negotiate with yourself before you even take the negotiation to the opposition. Just be brave enough to ask for at least what you actually want. Notice that I say “at least”. Even that is giving in before you start. You really need to ask for more than what you want to have any chance of getting what you want.

Here is an excerpt from the article mentioned above.

Ezra Klein, 2009, interview with Sanders

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/06/will_single_payer_supporters_h.html

[Klein] Lastly, you’re the author of one of my favorite pieces of legislation: The bill to create a prize process for pharmaceuticals. Want to say a word on that?

[Sanders] That makes single payer look like a conservative bill! [Laughs] All that that does is take on the entire pharmaceutical industry and say that everything they’ve been telling the world for many years is simply not true.

Bernie Sanders knows this lesson in Political Negotiation 101. Ask for something so outrageous, that what you actually want seems conservative by comparison.

The trouble with this knowledge of negotiation when it comes to a political negotiation where you need public support is that first you have to get public support. If, in this negotiation process, you already start to bargain down from what you want, you end up with an Obama type negotiator. The public has to learn the process of negotiation so that they don’t demand that their leadership bargain down just to get the public on board. Hillary Clinton and her team have already taken us too far down the road away from what we really want.

The mere fact that I have to explain this in public is already a step in the wrong direction. I’d rather not have to repeat this explanation in public.