One of the great puzzles about the Obama administration that historians will have to suss out is just what their actual position was going into and during the negotiations over the Grand Bargain. This isn’t a simple question to define, let alone attempt to answer in a definitive way.
The biggest problem is that the Obama administration has never, in my opinion, been very honest about what transpired, and why. In their telling, they were completely sincere in making these offers to Boehner and were shocked to learn that he would not and (even more importantly) could not accept them. That’s the line Dan Pfeiffer is still pushing, and it’s at least partially true. There is no doubt, for example, that the White House was slow to learn that Boehner could not deliver on his promises and that the administration wasn’t really having a genuine negotiation with him.
However, I do not believe that the White House ever expected the House Republicans to accept their terms. Their strategy was to dangle forbidden fruit but hold back enough that they’d never actually have to deliver on their offers. So, what surprised them wasn’t that Boehner didn’t accept their plan but that he did. And, once he did, they were shocked to discover that he didn’t have the power to bring his caucus along with him.
There was definitely some bad thinking going on on the White House side. They wavered on whether a bad deal was better than no deal at all. They were clear that the primary objective was to appear reasonable in order to assure that they didn’t get the blame for a failure of negotiations, and a failure was the default assumption. This meant that there was little cost to appearing to give away the store. But, at some point, Boehner attempted to call them on their bluff, and that’s the point where everything gets very contentious. Did the president back out of the deal, as I believe he did? Or did it turn out that Boehner couldn’t deliver either way, which I also believe to be true?
Why this matters is because it was at this time that the White House finally learned that they’d do better not even trying to negotiate with the GOP. But this lesson was a results-driven lesson that only could be fully applied once Obama won reelection. Until a second term was assured, the optics and the politics mattered at least as much as the policy, and for this reason they felt compelled to pursue Obama’s campaign promise to take the poison out of partisan politics and change the tone in Washington. If they failed, it had to be the Republicans who took the blame.
There’s no question that parts of the White House operated during the first term as if it were their responsibility to cut deals, even lousy deals, in the interest of getting things done. Some probably saw the Republicans as having enough legitimate political power after the 2010 midterms that they had a right to expect unsavory concessions. Others saw what was happening more clearly.
In the end, those concessions were not made. Some progressives will argue until the end of time that it was only Republican radicalism that saved the day and that the White House was desperate for a Grand Bargain. The truth is much more complicated. The White House was divided. They were primarily concerned with getting the president reelected. The most important thing was that Obama be perceived as the only adult in the room, and he couldn’t do that if he was seen as just as intransigent as the Republicans.
But they wavered. They might have cut a deal that we would all regret if their terms had been unexpectedly accepted.
What’s clearer is that, freed from the need to worry about getting reelected, the president was able to show his true preferences. And that should guide us when we look back to his first term and try to figure out what was happening at the time.
