People have often wondered why the Democrats are such “bad negotiators.” “Why don’t they ask for the moon and demand something far to the left,” they ask, so as to force the discussion onto their end of the playing field, thus making the final compromise where they wanted to be in the first place? Isn’t that negotiating 101?
Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has not been traditionally opposed to a deficit reduction plan. The CBPP supports chained CPI, for example. So it’s quite something to see Greenstein, along with Paul van de Water and Richard Kogan, savage the Democratic opening bid in the Catfood Commission II, describing it as to the right of Bowles-Simpson, the Gang of Six and other deficit plans.
The new deficit-reduction plan from a majority of Democrats on the congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (the “supercommittee”) marks a dramatic departure from traditional Democratic positions — and actually stands well to the right of plans by the co-chairs of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission and the Senate’s “Gang of Six,” and even further to the right of the plan by the bipartisan Rivlin-Domenici commission. The Democratic plan contains substantially smaller revenue increases than those bipartisan proposals while, for example, containing significantly deeper cuts in Medicare and Medicaid than the Bowles-Simpson plan. The Democratic plan features a substantially higher ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases than any of the bipartisan plans.
Since the GOP certainly isn’t going to negotiate from the left (although at this point, you have to wonder if they don’t see this as more than a fake electoral opening…) they can only be doing this if they want the Democratic position to be to the right of Simpson-Bowles. Maybe they think they can get some Republicans to take yes for an answer. Who knows if there are enough Blue Dogs available to make up for those who won’t. But if this is another of their devious plans to make the GOP look “unreasonable,” I guess they must believe that “reasonable” is to edge ever closer to Paul Ryan’s Randian lunacy.
Update: It occurs to me that John McCain’s slip on NPR that I referenced below might be a clue as to the end game on this. If the jobs bill gambit is any guide, it’s possible that we could see the Super Committee fall apart and the congress decide they aren’t going to abide by that silly trigger after all. Then, they can take pieces of the Super Committee’s agreed upon items as they did this week on the jobs bill — the cuts — and throw President Obama’s taunt about the opposition “supporting these ideas in the past” back in the Democrats’ faces. Without substantial outside pressure, I doubt that Democrats will have the fortitude to thumb their noses at the GOP the way the Republicans are thumbing their nose at them.