Obama’s strategy for negotiating with the Repubs: start near the 50-yard line and then move closer to their position

President Barack Obama at a meeting with his advisers in the Oval Office, June 8, 2011, Souza/White House 

 

 

Thanks to Paul Krugman in his item titled President Pushover for linking to Elizabeth Drew’s just published article in the NY Review of Books. Drew offers a blunt assessment of Barack Obama’s strategy for negotiating with Republicans:

Someday people will look back and wonder, What were they thinking? Why, in the midst of a stalled recovery, with the economy fragile and job creation slowing to a trickle, did the nation’s leaders decide that the thing to do—in order to raise the debt limit, normally a routine matter—was to spend less money, making job creation all the more difficult? Many experts on the economy believe that the President has it backward: that focusing on growth and jobs is more urgent in the near term than cutting the deficit, even if such expenditures require borrowing. But that would go against Obama’s new self-portrait as a fiscally responsible centrist.

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