Confirmation: it wasn’t 11th dimensional chess
by David Atkins
It’s good to see this out in the open:
Shortly before President Barack Obama was re-elected, he confided to John Podesta, an informal adviser, a vow he was making for his second term: He would never again bargain with Republicans to extend the U.S. debt limit.
The precedent, set in the agreement that ended a 2011 budget standoff, “sent a signal that this was fair game to blackmail over whether the country would default,” Podesta, a onetime chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and co-chairman of Obama’s 2008 presidential transition, said in an interview. “He feels like he has to end it and end it forever.”
The stand Obama has taken on the latest fight over the government shutdown and borrowing limit — refusing to tie policy conditions to raising the debt ceiling — is an attempt to repair some of the damage that he and his aides believe he sustained by making concessions to Republicans to avert a default two years ago, according to former top administration officials and advisers…
If Obama makes concessions again to House Republicans over raising the $16.7 trillion debt limit, “he’ll be viewed as a guy who you can hold up,” said Podesta, chairman of the Center for American Progress, a Washington research group with close ties to the administration.
Obama is surrounded by a core group of aides who are mostly veterans of the 2011 debt negotiations, which were followed by the first downgrade of U.S. government debt…
At the same time, a political breakdown that leads to a debt default carries greater risk over the long run for Obama than for the Republicans. An economic crisis that might tip the country back into recession would tarnish his presidency and the durability of his initiatives such as expanding health care to millions of uninsured Americans and pushing through the most sweeping changes in financial-market rules in seven decades.
“There’s a hell of a lot more at stake for the president of the United States,” said Leon Panetta, Obama’s former defense secretary and Central Intelligence Agency director. “Nobody remembers who was speaker of the House when we went into the Depression; everybody remembers who the president was.”
He added: “Presidents who are successful are ultimately presidents who are able to get it done, get beyond this crisis. We cannot be a country that is constantly facing crisis.”
This is a good thing. People make mistakes, and it’s all for the better when they learn from them. Whether one believes that the President actively wants to cut earned benefits or not is irrelevant to the question of whether negotiating budget issues in the face of a debt ceiling crisis is a good idea.
It isn’t. It wasn’t, and the President acknowledges that. One can wonder why this wasn’t obvious to him and his advisers at the time when so many of us were loudly pointing it out, or why they didn’t apply the same lesson learned from 2011 to the sequester battle of January 2013. But so be it. It’s the sign of a good leader to be able to learn from mistakes and make corrections.
But let’s all stop pretending that the President was playing 11th dimensional chess in 2011. He wasn’t. He wanted a grand bargain on the deficit (wrongly) and he thought the debt ceiling negotiations would be a good time to get it. That was an even bigger error that emboldened Republicans and put the nation at risk. Those of us who called it an error were right, his defenders were wrong, and the President is now admitting that and acting on it–much to his credit.
Which makes him, ironically, a far bigger adult and smarter person than those who pretend he’s always the biggest adult and smartest person in the room.
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