The recent, and ongoing, debt ceiling negotiation to some extent vindicates my earlier post explaining the framework of why Obama does what he does.
It is common nowadays to call it (derisively) "Nth dimensional chess," meaning that Obama is acting according to a level of understanding way outside our own and working toward some grand scheme of devastating his political opponents. The implication being, we can't possibly understand what he's doing, so it's best just to stick with him and wait for it all to fall in place like a diabolical Rube Goldberg machine.
But it's not that complicated, most people just make bad assumptions when trying to explain why president Obama does what he does. And based on those assumptions, there is no way to figure it out. Even though the logic is simple.
Remember that in my previous discussion I described an axis of progress, which is the series of legislative or other things that an individual wants (or doesn't want) to happen. For example, for a stereotypical democrat, the Public Option of health care would have been high on their axis of progress. Whereas, privatizing Medicare would be very low on their axis of progress.
The mistake is that people tend to assume their politicians operate on the same axis of progress that they care about. But it's almost universally not true, though there is some (indirect) overlap. President Obama is not working on his constituents' axis of progress, he's working on his own. And he's not combating Republicans on their constituents' axis of progress either, but against that of the narrow number Republicans he's actually in the negotiation room with.
It's important to consider how president Obama's axis of progress maps onto that of his constituents. His constituents want a list of items ranging from "protect medicare and social security" to "generate jobs" to "acting tough against his opponents in public." They (for example, Cenk Uygur or Norman Goldman) see that president Obama is not standing up so firmly on these things and call him a terrible negotiator.
However, president Obama's axis of progress is different. It involves measures ranging from "make sure that legislation doesn't stall" (a lesson learned from the health care reform debate) to "appeal to independents" to "don't shock the economy" to "get re-elected." This is a much different list, and the mapping to what his based wants is not always so direct. For example, if he puts up a big fight, then it would definitely motivate some of his base but can turn off independents who dismiss "all of Washington" as being catty and incompetent. What we've seen now is that he was timing his combativeness until Republicans made it politically permissible for him to turn it on. Sometimes (last December) he never gets the opportunity; in this case he did.
Republicans, on the other hand, are not after what their constituents want. That is why, for example, they turned down an outrageously good deal with Democrats. The Republicans don't get voted into office any more strongly if they cut spending by $4tn or $2tn. For them, the whole point of demanding more (and then less) than what president Obama offered was the show of combativeness. Their principle goal is to win the next election, and the components of that strategy are to curry favor from donors, and appear combative for the base. The Republicans are appealing to two groups with (usually, but presently crumbling) orthogonal interests, which I shorthand as R$ and Rtea.
This moment is interesting because this is one of the first times that R$ and Rtea wanted strictly opposed outcomes. R$ wanted the debt ceiling to be raised, because failure to do this would result in a damaged economy and hurt their bottom line. Plus, it would hurt the Republican brand by shutting down crucial government spending or confidence, which would diminish R$'s investment in the Republican power structure by wrecking the party's influence. On the other hand, Rtea want the debt ceiling not to be raised, because they interpret it as allowing the deficit to continue to grow, or they believe in Monetarian principles that say the market will correct itself only when liquidity leaves the market and prices are allowed to sink--almost regardless of the circumstances of that sinking.
So this was a moment when president Obama could really advance along his axis of progress, and he took it. This is not a mysterious thing, once you realize what his axis of progress is. It is not preventing Social Security or Medicare from being touched, so much as it is winning re-election. And there are more ways to win re-election than just to curry favor with supporters. He can also, as he did in this case, try to drive a wedge between the factions of the Republican party.
This is how:
Republicans' best chance to prevent R$ and Rtea from conflicting was to demand such major concessions that president Obama would be goaded to back out of negotiations. This is because major concessions (say, a constitutional amendment making it harder to raise taxes) would cause R$ to feel as if the Republicans were backing them, and at the very least they could not complain about Republicans if President Obama were the one who backed out as a result. Rtea would be happy because Republicans would appear very brazen and combative. President Obama would lose in that deal because not only would his own base say he caved, but business interests would home in on president Obama for wanting to raise their taxes. Republicans would emerge, having satisfied their increasingly conflicting constituencies and president Obama would have been knocked down a peg. This would be similar in impact to what happened in December 2010. So Republicans' goal was not actually to win the $3tn spending cuts they called for, in fact that would buy them very little in terms of political advantage because it was the spectacle of Obama getting mad and backing down that they were after. That is probably also why they were so quick to claim president Obama had walked out of negotiations, when he was about to leave and gave Rep. Cantor a stern lecture on his way out.
President Obama, not playing Nth dimensional chess but mere 1-dimensional chess along his own axis of progress, saw this coming and called Republicans' bluff. They asked for $3tn, and he said, "I'll do you one better, I'll do $4tn. But I need ~15% of that to be revenue, that's more than fair."
Now put yourself in Rep. Boehner's shoes. By making a large request, he had represented his position to be that the spending cuts were not small enough to shrink the deficit--a reasonable policy stance that a party might respectably have. But because this was not his goal, and he really wanted to goad president Obama to end negotiations, he had very little to gain with his constituents when president Obama stepped up the offer to $4tn including some substantial cuts to Democratic long-standing sacred cows, which sounded very good according to rep. Boehner's stated goal of faster deficit reduction and sounded good from the stated Republican perspective of wanting to do away with these sacred cows--and in return, the president was asking for something that would deeply hurt his position with his constituents: a tax increase.
So now we hit the crux of it. At that moment, Rep. Boehner had been backed into a corner of, on one side, his stated, understandable goals; on the other, his unstated, opportunistic goals. And now he had to make a choice: does he bolster the facade of the former by taking this deal, and in doing so choose to placate R$ at the cost of making Rtea very angry? Or does he choose to slough away the image of having understandable goals and nakedly pick a fight with R$ to placate Rtea? And this decision must be made in the context of Rep. Cantor grabbing for his position as Speaker, which would become all the more easy if he chose to anger Rtea.
In the end, Rep. Boehner chose the latter, and that is why president Obama then gained the political go-ahead to turn on anger and ridicule, something that he is able to do very rarely (to the disappointment of his party). This has had the effect of galvanizing his own party around him, even the ones who a moment ago were decrying the ease with which he is willing to carve into his party's own child, Medicare. This also puts the Republicans in a bad position, because now that Republicans are openly threatening the national economy for opportunistic reasons, they have been cast in a very poor light and if the debt ceiling does not rise and all the bad fallout ensues, it will assuredly be blamed on them.
Now, Republicans probably have little choice but to get either minor concessions, major concessions in trade for other major concessions, or just pass a clean sweep and hope this story disappears as fast as possible. Or they can continue to insist that the debt ceiling not rise, in which case the unpaid soldiers, unpaid elderly, their family and friends, etc will descend on them in the next election.
So this has been a good lesson to us all. This should not be understood as a "turning point" where President Obama revealed himself as a master Nth dimensional chess player thinking 20 steps ahead. This was a 1 dimensional chess game, and the mistake people have been making is they were assuming that his axis of progress was policy goals, when really it is influence and election goals. Just like the Republicans.
At the same time, people should probably stop saying he's a bad negotiator. He's very good at negotiating--for what he actually wants to get, even if that's not exactly what his constituents want.
Cross-posted at: Gnomanomics