David Brooks is an insufferable jackass. I have no use for his designation of ‘cluster’ and ‘network’ liberals. But he does come close to approximating the truth with this bit:
The big story of the week is that Obama is returning to first principles, re-establishing himself as a network liberal. This isn’t a move to the center or triangulation. It’s not the Clinton model or the Truman model or any of the other stale categories people are trying to impose on him. It’s standing at one spot in the political universe and trying to build temporarily alliances with people at other spots in the political universe.
You don’t have to abandon your principles to cut a deal. You just have to acknowledge that there are other people in the world and even a president doesn’t get to stamp his foot and have his way.
Cluster liberals in the House and the commentariat are angry. They have no strategy for how Obama could have better played his weak hand — with a coming Republican majority, an expiring tax law and several Democratic senators from red states insisting on extending all the cuts. They just sense the waning of their moment and are howling in protest.
They believe nonliberals are blackmailers or hostage-takers or the concentrated repositories of human evil, so, of course, they see coalition-building as collaboration. They are also convinced that Democrats should never start a negotiation because they will always end up losing in the end. (Perhaps psychologists can explain the interesting combination: intellectual self-confidence alongside a political inferiority complex).
I think it is overstating the case to say that liberal critics had no strategy for how Obama could have done better. I believe our advice was to play chicken with the Republicans and take the tax cuts down to the moment before the ball drops in Times Square. If necessary, let them expire and make damn sure everyone in the country knows why their taxes went up. Yes, it would be damaging to the economy in the short-term and would probably rattle Wall Street a bit (as the White House warned Chuck Schumer). But it would be good politics and great for the budget deficit. And, the GOP would probably have backed down at some point.
The flaw in our thinking isn’t that we had no strategy for how to win the battle over tax cuts. I think the flaw might have been in focusing too exclusively on tax cuts and not enough on what waging that battle would cost in other areas, like getting unemployment insurance extended, getting the START treaty ratified, getting a continuing resolution, passing the Defense Authorization, and whatever else is on the must-do list during the lame duck. The president has to weigh everything, and he apparently made the calculation that fighting it out on the tax cuts had too much downside and too much uncertainty. I find that frustrating but he’s not making easy decisions. I wouldn’t trade the START treaty for millionaire’s tax cuts, so I understand how difficult it is to put everything in proper balance.
On another point, I find it a bit disconcerting to find myself much more temperamentally aligned with Chuck Schumer than the president. Call me a cluster Democrat if you want, but I do basically see the Republicans as “the concentrated repositories of human evil.” I don’t see Dick Lugar or Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski that way. But they are almost irrelevant these days. Most incoming Republicans are petty criminals, paid to have stupid greedhead opinions, or genuinely so stupid as to not know they’re supposed to be putting on a show. You negotiate with them because you have to, not because there is an intrinsic merit in it or because you get better policy that way.
Yet, in the universe of liberal opinion, I guess Brooks would call me a Network Democrat. But that is only because he is an idiot.
