Paul Rosenberg has a lot of gall trying to explain logical fallacies to the unwashed masses.
President Obama is a walking embodiment of this fallacy. He is so eager to embrace Republican ideas— Bush’s TARP, tax cuts in his stimulus bill, the Heritage Foundation’s individual mandate, ” “cap and trade,” fiscal austerity, making permanent the vast majority of Bush’s tax cuts, etc.—that he embraces objectively bad ideas, divides his own base, and doesn’t even get any political benefit from it. For one thing, he doesn’t give Republicans an opportunity to fight for their own ideas—to demonstrate to their own base that they stand for something that is in dispute. Rather than make them more willing to compromise with him, this increases the pressure on them to fight. We’ve seen this over and over again throughout the Obama presidency, but Obama never seems to learn. His very zeal in seeking compromise only makes it that much harder for Republicans who need to fight him. So it’s really not all that surprising when they turn around and accuse him of being “unwilling to negotiate,” however misleading that may be. Whatever else is involved in keeping Obama stuck where he is, the false balance fallacy is part of the equation.
TARP was not an objectively bad idea. Tax cuts in the stimulus bill were not an objectively bad idea. The individual mandate is not an objectively bad idea. Cap and Trade is not an objectively bad idea. And fiscal austerity and the continuation of Bush’s tax cuts for the middle class may be objectively bad ideas (although, in a recession, the latter probably makes sense), but they were the result of a combination of political reality (keeping campaign promises) and Republican intransigence.
Rosenberg comes closer to hitting on something important when he notes that Obama has forced the Republicans to abandon some of their substantive policy ideas simply by being willing to adopt them himself. This is certainly the case with cap and trade and the individual mandate. But, it should be remembered that cap and trade and the individual mandate were never really sincere Republicans positions. They were positions they adopted to give themselves an excuse for not supporting Democratic proposals for tackling climate change and the millions of people who lack health insurance. By adopting those policies for the Democratic Party, Obama called their bluff. If they had been sincere about offering those ideas, the Republicans would have agreed to turn them into law rather than relabeling them tyrannical socialism.
What Rosenberg sees as some kind of pathological desire to find compromise, I see as a diabolical plan to destroy the Republican Party simply by being reasonable and offering them what they say they want. “You think everyone should be personally responsible enough to get their own health insurance? Okay, let’s do that.”
If you think the president wanted to enter office in the middle of a recession and take over the responsibility for TARP and getting some Republican senators to agree to a stimulus package, and if you think he and Clinton and Edwards embraced the individual mandate because that was their first policy choice, and if you think cap and trade was pursued because it was considered the optimal policy, then maybe you think the president has offered Republicans concessions because he likes those concessions rather than because you have to make concessions to get the votes you need to make laws.
In other words, if you think the rooster’s crow caused the Sun to rise, then you might also think that the president’s policies were caused by his personal preferences rather than the constraints he faces in our political system.
