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  Matt Osborne: Obama Gets 11-Dimensional Chess Win; Epic Fail for Media, GOP
Reported by Huffington Post on Thursday, 19 November 2009 (on November 19, 2009)
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Though we have heard of foolishly rushing to war, we have never seen cleverness in war associated with long delays...Delay tends to favor misfortune over good fortune. As long as affected parties have at least adequately prepared for the moment at hand, delay risks an escalation of misfortune. --Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The Republican Party has built its entire legislative strategy around saying \"no\" while avoiding substantive discussion. The result is now an \"escalation of misfortune\" in a strong Senate bill headed for cloture.
Republican intransigence didn\'t create Congressional inaction, but rather removed the GOP from having any role at all. Nor has the GOP second-guessed this approach at any point. Just this past Sunday, Mitch McConnell said he would delay any health care bill until next year:
\"There will be a lot of amendments over a lot of weeks. The Senate is not the House, you saw in the House there was three votes and it was over in one day,\" McConnell warned. \"This will be on the floor for quite a long time.\"
Now that the bill is out, Orrin Hatch (R-UT) vows \"holy war\" to kill it. If they had any sense, Republicans would just shut up and stop making things worse. Now that the Senate health care reform bill is out, the GOP\'s failed strategy of delay and the media\'s many premature funerals for the public option both seem more than a little silly.
Harry Reid\'s Senate bill was unveiled to a meeting of Senate Democrats yesterday evening to loud applause. With the strongest public option since this process began, the bill covers 94% of the population at a cost of $849 billion, reduces the federal deficit by $127 billion, and bends the health-care cost curve.In other words, it is very likely to work very well and leave Republicans looking very foolish.
They are joined by the Washington media establishment, which has consistently pronounced the public option \"dead\" at every phase of the health care reform debate, and now show every sign of compounding their error before Dick Durbin (D-IL) tries to bring the bill to cloture on Saturday.
Cloture is a fancy word for a very simple concept: before you can begin to talk about something, you have to agree to talk about it. Senate rules limit the debate to 30 hours; all a cloture vote does is start that debate.
The GOP cannot stop this bill. Indeed, they are still unprepared for \"the moment at hand.\" They are relying on at least one Democrat to stand with them and prevent the Senate from even discussing the bill, and that is extremely unlikely to happen.
Blue Dogs have no grounds to oppose discussion. Ben Nelson ($-NE) and Joe Lieberman (?-CT) may try, but Reid doesn\'t actually need them to pass a public option if they do. He can use budget reconciliation, and at this point every delay strengthens the public option on offer -- a point Harry Reid might have made to Lieberman already, given the Connecticut senator\'s conflicting signals and contradictory arguments.
Even Ben Nelson has already signaled he won\'t stand against cloture. It would be political suicide. Blue Dogs can make their case in floor speeches after cloture. They can try, and quite likely fail, to amend the public option out of the bill. Ultimately it only needs fifty senators, so Nelson and friends can earn their thirty silver and well may it profit them.
The Republican party, on the other hand, will be out in the cold. They will have bet everything and lost. The biggest social safety-net legislation in decades will be a solely Democratic achievement. Obama couldn\'t ask for a better brand-building outcome.
It didn\'t have to be this way. Had the Republican Party not insisted on lock-step opposition to reform, one Republican -- just one! -- could have delivered a consensus for a weaker bill. The key word being consensus, because as the legislative process worked itself out in Congress the GOP left the debate among Democrats. We are now seeing the results.
Republicans counted on the classic \"circular firing squad\" to repeat its performance in 1993. But Obama had a different approach than Clinton. A couple of months ago I adopted the term 11-Dimensional Chess in describing it, but since then it has dawned on me that what we\'re seeing is the politics of consensus. It shows up in all Obama\'s policy battles, including gay rights, climate change legislation, and Afghanistan.That\'s a big statement, I know, but I\'m no longer the only one noticing this. Consider how Andrew Sullivan describes the phenomenon:
What we are seeing here, I suspect, is what we see everywhere with Obama: a relentless empiricism in pursuit of a particular objective and a willingness to let the process take its time. The very process itself can reveal - not just to Obama, but to everyone - what exactly the precise options are. Instead of engaging in adolescent tests of whether a president is \"tough\" or \"weak\", we actually have an adult prepared to allow the various choices in front of us be fully explored. He is, moreover, not taking the decision process outside the public arena. He is allowing it to unfold within the public arena. Others, moreover, are allowed to take the lead: McChrystal, or Netanyahu, or Pelosi, in the case of Af-Pak, Israel-Palestine and health insurance, respectively. Obama encourages the process but hangs back, broadly - and persistently - pursuing certain objectives without tipping his hand on specifics or timing.
So the troop question is rather like the public option question. (Boldface mine)
Consensus politics is all about process and inclusion, and it has produced a bill very much like the one Obama outlined in his health care speech. But when he didn\'t absolutely demand a public option at that time, the media declared it dead (again) and Republicans went back to ignoring it.
Yet once the process was left only to the Democrats, House Blue Dogs found themselves badly outnumbered for the very first time. Worse, their arguments against a public option were weak or sadly misinformed: it made reform cheaper, reduced the deficit, and bent the cost-curve. The longer the debate lasted, the greater the consensus for the public option grew.
Thus a bill very much like the one Obama campaigned on, and within the parameters he outlined in his speeches, seems on the cusp of passing. If so, it will be a big fail for \"tea party\" politics; but it will also be the biggest media fail since Judith Miller and Operation Iraqi Liberation.
My fellow HuffPo blogger Chris Weigant put it best: \"the media\'s credibility, not the public option, is what is dead:\"
Republicans offered this up as a piece of \"conventional wisdom,\" and the media swallowed the story hook, line, and sinker all summer long. While there were voices in the blogosphere\'s wilderness saying \"there are bigger fights ahead, Baucus\' committee is a minor skirmish,\" most of the mainstream media watched the hotheads yelling at town hall meetings, and took an enormous leap to reach the conclusion that the public option was deader than a doornail. Forgetting, I suppose, that a scattering of angry, vocal protesters are not who writes the actual legislation. Or something. At this point, it\'s hard to even fathom the depths of the media\'s distractibility on crucial issues facing our nation. (Boldface mine)
Over at DailyKos, one diarist has been keeping a list of pundits who\'ve declared the public option dead; it\'s an eclectic mix of left, right, and media middle. Despite polls showing supermajority approval, the punditocracy declared the public option un-popular. Rather than explain its deficit-reducing and cost-curve bending qualities, they have deemed it unrealistic. Instead of a narrative of hostile Republican opposition, the media said reform wouldn\'t pass without bipartisanship and left the onus on Obama.
This all adds up to a spectacular fail. Worse, the media witlessly enabled Obama. Even as the ugly signs and loud noises distracted the punditocracy, Beltway noises assumed a strange pattern.
Anonymous White House sources would tell the media the public option was dead or dying, usually on a weekend. This was invariably followed by another round of emails from activist organizations asking me to do something! because the public option was under threat! -- always with helpful contact information for my member of Congress. Balanced against all the teabaggery, it had a propulsive affect on the progressive majority. When August began, pro-reform activism was lethargic at best; by the end of August, progressives were winning back the town halls and reform started rebounding in the polls.
Invariably, the White House denied these reports after one or two days, presenting the true case as the opposite of whatever the rumor said. At this point, the phrase \"anonymous White House sources\" is clearly synonymous with \"wrong,\" but the pattern repeats nevertheless. The White House is deliberately manipulating expectations by playing to the media\'s constant need for a scoop -- examples here, here, and here.
So the White House fed the rumors and then quashed them. Meanwhile, they pressured Congress indirectly through a vast network of progressive organizations. Their true position remained ambiguous becuase they were building a consensus for the public option with one hand and keeping their position obscure with the other.
The media never stopped telling us that time was running out. Republicans like McConnell seemed to think they were running out the clock, but it turns out that time has been to Obama\'s advantage. The Republican strategy of delay escalated their misfortune; their \"tea party\" movement is a great, big Teabagger Fail, and the media\'s credibility is shot right along with them.
Which brings me back to my previous foray into the political science of Sun Tzu, when I quoted the DKos diarist known as Maimonides:
(The White House) did this by keeping the fight, the mess, largely contained in the Legislature, that hallowed institution where they make the sausage that the President later cooks up in a Rose Garden signing. They get what they want, they get to claim the victory, and they kept their hands remarkably clean, by keeping the American people from perceiving them as having lost the argument. They\'ll need that for the next issue. And the next one. Because they aren\'t just interested in delivering quality, affordable health care to every American. They\'re interested in modernizing energy policy, they\'re interested in signing bills repealing DOMA and DADT, they\'re interested in reforming regulation of Wall Street and reducing our nuclear stockpile. They have a lot of work ahead of them.
They are facing an endless series of battles like this one. And from my POV they plan to win them all. (Emphasis mine)
\"Winning them all\" won\'t be that hard to do if the opposition and its media stovepipe don\'t quit stomping their last shreds of credibility into the ground.
Osborne Ink is a Website of Media Deconstruction
\"News that\'s fairly liberal but never unbalanced\"
Links: Full news story
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