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As I see it, the President, on issue after issue, begins his negotiations with the opposition having already determined what he believes the other side will agree to. Now, that predetermination, in the context of any particular issue, could be correct or it could be incorrect. It's a hunch (and most of the time probably a pretty well-educated hunch, but a hunch nonetheless.) But regardless of whether the predetermination was correct or not, the fact that the President uses it as his starting point for negotiations means, inevitably, that any resulting final agreement will be weighted even more in favor of the opposition. The one thing we'll never know with this President is what could have happened if the President had staked out positions well to the left of where he ultimately figured the agreement would land, and had vigorously fought for those positions both in the negotiating room and in speeches to the public. Had he managed to get a significant proportion of voters behind more progressive ideas, who knows what political pressure might have been brought to bear on Republicans?
As a bit of a personal aside, I'm reminded of the very first time I bought a car of my own, when I learned a little something about negotiating with an adversary. It was 1984 (I was 23). My Dad went with me to several different dealers of different makes, but ultimately it was at the Nissan dealership that I saw the car I simply had to have. A silver 1984 Nissan Stanza 4-door sedan, 5-speed standard transmission with a sunroof. Now, I was prepared to pay the sticker price right then and there (I figured it was like anything else I was used to buying: it had a price tag, and you paid the cashier the price on the tag!) At some point, seeing the negotiating fiasco that was playing out before his eyes, my Dad stepped in and began haggling with the salesman. But it was a little too late: the salesman had already seen that I was determined to get that car. Dad managed to bring the price down by a couple hundred bucks, but the salesman wouldn't budge beyond that because he knew I was determined to buy the car. As we were leaving the dealership, I was a bit annoyed with my Dad; in my 23-year-old, thank-you-I-already-know-everything-there-is-to-know-about-the-world arrogance, I was insulted that Dad "took over" my interaction with the salesman. I mean, I was a full grown man of 23! So as we were leaving I said to Dad in a slightly irritated tone of voice, "You know, I was perfectly capable of handling that myself!" Dad chuckled a little bit, and said, "Well, look, I wasn't trying to step on your toes, and I know you could have completed the purchase yourself. I know you are a competent adult. But this happens to be an area where I, as a 57 year-old, have some experience that you, as a 23 year-old, do not have. I was simply trying to prevent you having to pay more for the car than was really necessary." He went on to explain the game that is played with car sales, and why it was thus important when negotiating a sale never to telegraph either that you have already made up your mind to buy a particular car (even if you had), or to ever let the dealer know what your bottom line was; and he added that one needn't worry at all about "taking advantage" of the dealer, because all of this was built into their business model. (Of course, in my naïveté, it simply hadn't occurred to me that a car salesman might be less-than-totally upfront or honest with me.) Needless to say, I felt pretty foolish at having been insulted by my Dad's efforts!
So to get back to the President's negotiating strategy, I imagine many of us can think of a story not unlike the one I shared above where we learned a little something about how the world works. And that's what stumps me with regard to the President. He is clearly an extremely intelligent man. As someone schooled in law, surely he must have at least a passing understanding of the kinds of negotiating tactics lawyers and business persons typically employ when negotiating deals. So I am simply at a loss to understand how a 50 year-old man (he's just three months younger than me) can get to this stage of life without understanding that in a highly politicized, polarized environment, anything short of the hardest political hardball will result in your getting played bigtime. In fact, I find it almost impossible to believe any 50 year-old wouldn't understand that. So then I'm left to wonder, since he surely must be aware of how adversarial negotiations are played, why does he constantly refuse to play the game, especially when the results wind up being significantly short of the original goals he (claims to have) supported? And the only answers I cna come up with to that question are profoundly troubling ones.
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