Bear with me for a moment.

I want to imagine that you are on the roof of a tall building with a psychotic person threatening to jump off the roof. He’s also holding a device with his thumb on a button linked to a bomb in the basement that will cause an explosion to bring down the building. When he jumps off the ledge he will release the button. You see, in his deluded state he actually believes he can fly and that by bringing the building down he will save it. He believes that the explosion will only harm “bad” people, and that all the good people he cares about will be miraculously saved.

He threatens to jump unless you agree to throw all the “bad people” out of the building so he and his friends (the “good people” who live on the upper floors) can have the building all to themselves. Of course in his mind, the bad people, who make up most of the people in the building, many of whom live in the basement, deserve to die. To him they are all worthless scum who should never have been allowed in the building in the first place. He doesn’t even realize that his bomb will kill many of his own family and friends.

What do you do? And how did things ever come to this?

Well …

The building is a co-operative. The upper floors are full of suites and penthouses. Indeed, the building’s foundations are crumbling because the people who live in those upper floor in incredible luxury have not been been paying their full share of their co-op fees. Some have even managed to not pay any co-op fees at all. They had plenty of money to pay their co-op fees, but they simply refused.

Instead, the upper floor people manipulated events so that they were able to hire a building manager who did whatever they asked. He was unwilling to make repairs to the building. This manger actually increased the co-op fees on the people in the lower floors and lowered them on the people in the upper floors. He also went out and borrowed a great deal of extra money that he gave to the people on the upper floors (the same people the psychotic person on the ledge calls the “good guys”). This caused a lot of pain for the people in the lower floors but the building manager didn’t care because he was getting a few extra pennies a week to do what the people in the upper floors wanted him to do.

It finally got so bad that the building was about to collapse. The people in the building finally recognized they had to do something. They threw out the old building manager and hired you to be the new one. And you promised to fix things, to firm up the foundations of the building and improve the lives of the people living in the lower floors. Trouble was the co-op had an elected board and the people on the top floors were able to fool enough of the co-op members living on the middle or lower floors to elect people from the upper floors or their proxies.

The upper floor people even convinced you to hire as your assistants some of their best friends. So while you were able to fix some of the problems (the building didn’t fall down though it still sways way too much in the wind), most of your efforts were insufficient. You kept thinking that you could make deals with the people on the upper floors, but they were better negotiators than you. They saw your willingness to compromise as a weakness and so they told their proxies on the co-op board to keep making ever increasing demands and to do everything they could to block your efforts.

Then, when things improved a lot for the people on the upper floors, but stayed the same or worsened for people on the bottom floors, another election was held for the co-op board. This time, the people on the upper floors spent just enough of their hoarded wealth to spread rumors that you were a very bad and evil man who was to blame for all the problems you inherited. Thus more of their proxies, pledged to represent the interests of the upper floor people, were elected, including, unfortunately, the psychotic person up on that roof.

So now here you are, with the psychotic person threatening to bring the building down. He hates you with am passion that only a madman can. All he says “Give me everything I want or else!” He won’t listen to anything you have to say.

Your own assistants and the people on the co-op board who support you have told you that you can;t negotiate with this man. They told you, “Let the people on the upper floors deal with him. They hired him after all. They don’t want the building blown up even if they do want to screw over all the rest of us to preserve their special privileges.”

Your friend and aides, even the ones you hired on the advice of people living in those upper floor penthouses, warned you that if you give in now to this mad man, you will likely be fired when your contract runs out and someone just as psychotic as the man on the ledge will be installed in your place.

So you allowed the people on the upper floors to try to talk the crazy man off the ledge. But you just couldn’t help thinking that you should do more. Surely there must be some way to reason with him. So, for no good reason you started to offer things to the crazy man that he wanted, things that would make the lives of the people in the basement and the people in the middle floors suffer a great deal. You kept in secret touch with the leader of the opposition (let’s call him Mr. Prick, shall we) on the co-op board and listened to him when he told you “Just give me a little bit more and maybe I can talk that crazy man off the ledge.”

You kept creeping closer and closer to the ledge yourself, at the urging of this Mr. Prick. The crazy man wasn’t talking to you, but Mr. Prick said not to worry. There was a “Grand Bargain” to be made that would save the building. And before you knew it, you were standing on that ledge by yourself, looking down below. In your hand was a device that would trigger tremendous damage to the building, but you were convinced that you had to do this, that this was the only way to save what could be saved.

You turned around and saw your friends screaming at you. “Are you nuts? You will destroy yourself and all of us with you! You will hurt most the very people you promised to help!” But you got mad at them. “Don’t you know this is the only way to save the building?” you said. “Don’t you know I can fly!”

President Obama, how do we talk you down from that ledge?