I do quite a bit of negotiating in my job, among very contentious people and entities.
The key to winning is a negotiation, in my experience, is based on two things:
1. You must be willing to walk away from the table, knowing that doing nothing is as bad as it can be.
2. You must be willing to ignore the clock. It is human nature to be concerned about deadlines. Almost all deadlines are in a person’s head, and can be circumvented. The person who is a slave to the clock is the loser.
We see this effectively used by the Democrat Senate and President. They capitalized on the Republican’s universal feeling that to get no deal done is the worst outcome. Boner lost the negotiation in a national interview when he said no matter what, a deal will be done. I knew then that he would cave, and so did every Democrat in the country.
We also see the use of the artificial deadline, which could have been circumvented. Would everyone just give up and go home at 12:01 a.m. on 1/1/13? Really?
We need some adults conducting negotiations. We will continue down this path for the next two years, and we will lose control of the House in two years as a result.
We are not setting the terms of the debate, we are not forcing the choice of language, we have no short or long-term plan, we have no vision, we have no unity of purpose, and we have no stomach to walk away from the deal.
There is no effective Republican representation. If I were a Democrat, I would double down and kick some ass. Watch for it to see if I am right.
LLS