Football is also heavily scripted and entirely deliberate, very nearly robotically so. A recent study (can’t find cite…) of a sampling of games showed that, on average, only 11 minutes of each 1 hour game clock is actual play. The rest is deliberation, setup, positioning and waiting while the clock is ticking.
Basketball is, ostensibly, a non-contact sport: You have to achieve your objective without hurting your opponent. Basketball, too, mostly happens on the fly. There are plays, but most never stay intact for more than a few seconds. The objective, too, is relatively small: a dunk, however spectacular, is still only worth 2 points. And instead of one or two plays making all the difference, you have to string together play after play all the while standing up to an equally relentless opponent (well, unless you’re playing the Nets… but I digress)
The point is that Obama is playing basketball for people who came to see a football game…
The recent fixation on the Bush tax cuts is an excellent example: Obama got much more than he gave. But progressives aren’t interested in what he got. They are mostly incensed that the GOP didn’t lose. This isn’t particularly surprising as any morally intelligent person can tell you that the GOP so solidly deserves to lose. The progressives, it seems, have turned on Obama not because he is effective at getting the policy he wants (he is) but that he is perceived as ineffective when it comes to punishing the opponent. They’ve twisted Obama from an advocate to a failed avenger.
In Petr’s Political Bestiary, the definition of an independent is ‘someone who despises Republicans but nevertheless believes everything they say about the Democrats’ in a similar manner the definition of a modern day progressive seems to be ‘An agnostic who, nevertheless, is desperately seeking a Messiah’. A long string of purported messiahs like Howard Dean and Wes Clark, amongst others, culminated, so they thought, in the election of Barack Obama and, frankly, because he’s not the messiah they thought he was, ready to rain down righteous unstoppable punishment on the GOP, they turn on him. In the same vein of looking for a single person who’ll cover all bases, they seek a single definitive and cathartic victory. And with each passing fight being compromised upon, this all consuming and vindicating victory seems less and less likely.
But politics, much like basketball, and less like football, is a game of small victories and relentless forward motion. Basketball rewards sublety and the instantaneous pivot and punishes the wrong kind of aggression. The Obama administration, in only two years, has vastly outpaced the Clinton administration for motion in the progressive direction and for having got the better of the GOP. If we were in a game of basketball, this particular quarter would seem fairly even… but the overall score would look more like a Harlem GlobeTrotters game…. and Obama ain’t the Washington Generals.
Who wins NBA games? Generally the teams with the best players. Economist David Berri ran some regressions to test — can a coach actually improve or worsen a team?
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p>A few coaches, like Phil Jackson, make a difference. But generally even those differences are small.
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p>Things are similar in presidential politics.
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p>Obama’s fate, barring some major security thing or scandal, is tied up with the employment rate. If he’s got good numbers, it’s like having good players. Bad numbers are the same as bad players. Even Phil Jackson can’t win with the Washington Wizards dreadful roster.
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p>Coaching decisions — Obama, Pelosi, Boehner, etc — fascinate the fans (of hoops, of politics), but don’t seem to matter as much as we think.
Gay Americans can not serve their country in uniform.
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p>If Obama’s DOJ had refused to appeal that Federal Court decision overturning DADT, Obama would have had an easy lay-up and 2 points for the civil rights team.
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p>But he threw the ball out to the perimeter, hoping the Senate (the world’s greatest deliberative body) could make the basket.
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p>Clunker.
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p>Look, petr’s metaphor is nice, but the reason I’m angry about this is that real people are hurting or insecure. Middle class people are falling into poverty. Banks are stealing homes:
That’s no game. Why isn’t the President speaking out about it?
Politics isn’t one party or the other giving up or taking yards. The whole country can move forward even while one party loses and the other wins.
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p>The president comes from one party, but he is president of the whole country. So he has to make sure he listens even to those who don’t vote his way.
the things he ‘got’ were things the Republicans were glad to give anyway. Or did you think a tax cut on payroll taxes wasn’t something the Republicans would have looooooooved to do?
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p>That the estate tax deal was thrown in there was insult to injury.
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p>Bernie Sanders was right to STAND UP FOR AMERICA today. Obama is out there for the elites. He’s not our guy. The sooner people realize that, the better the chance we’ll have to freaking save this country.
you are incensed that the GOP didn’t lose.
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p>What many on the left are failing to recognize is the concessions Obama extracted are far larger than anyone expected. I’m willing to bet most people 26-99 weeks unemployed are most hopeful this deal or something close to it happens.
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p>To bring in another game metaphor: Obama is playing the hand he was dealt the best he can. We do have a long-term deficit/debt problem and this deal is going to exacerbate it – but in the short term cutting a deal was the best card Obama had to play to help the people who are most in need NOW, as well as to ensure the fledgling recovery is less likely derailed by the tea-party types about to take power in the House.
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p>To say that you’re willing to give up those two things just because you don’t want rich people to get richer is in my opinion a poor bargain. The rich are still going to be rich, to tell the poor and working middle class we’re giving up a chance to help you so we can make the rich slightly less so is just silly, IMO.
Why does the hand Obama’s dealt so often seem to be as if the dealer was a conservative Republican?
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p>For a candidate who claimed his rhetoric could change the politics of Washington, he doesn’t seem to be using his rhetoric to push back the very people who want him out of Washington.
I’m always a little hesitant to speak for other BMGers, but I suspect Ryan is ultimately reacting to more than the substance of this negotiation per se. It’s the sense that he and others of us feel that the President has this tendency to START by giving the GOP what it wants and signalling he’ll bend over backwards even further if he has to. Just like when he dropped the public option on health care at the first whiff of trouble. I for one may have been able to swallow this deal if I felt it was actually negotiated over a period between parties bargaining in good faith, so for me it was process at least as much as outcome that leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I’ve heard this is stimulative and that it will wreck the economy, and that’s just from MSNBC primetime anchors who more often than not agree with each other. At this point if I were a member of Congress I’d lean toward voting for it, but would be tempted to walk on to the floor to cast my vote with an obnoxiously huge clothespin on my nose. I also applaud Senator Sanders for holding the floor yesterday and connecting a lot of dots, but for that to be effective MANY Democrats needed to be tag teaming each other over the last two years with those points, not just make a single eight-hour speech at the last minute.
I’m incensed that we gave up the cow for beans.
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p>Obama got nothing the Republicans weren’t willing to give. Nothing. You think the Republicans really wanted to filibuster unemployment? Do you remember what happened last time they tried to do that? There was fury across the nation. If they tried to do that just before Christmas this year — and the Democrats called them on it — it would have been get-out-your-pitchforks time.
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p>Or did you think the Republicans wouldn’t have passed a standalone bill for social security payroll tax cut? It was McConnell’s idea, for heaven’s sake! They’d love to do that, because next year they get to run against us “raising” taxes if we let it go up… or it becomes a permanent tax cut that destroys Social Security’s ability to pay for itself… necessitating we cut Social Security. Either way, the Republicans win. That’s a freaking Trojan Horse if I’ve ever seen one — it would be like the Trojans letting the horse inside their city with the words “we have our soldiers inside this and they’re going to come out at night when you’re all asleep to open up the gates” right on its side. They’re telegraphing their moves, and we’re still falling for them. Jesus freaking Christ people!
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p>And, finally, as I’ve said elsewhere on this thread… we’re not even playing checkers, never mind chess. Passing this without passing a raise to the debt ceiling is cutting off our nose to spite our face. After passing this, we’ll have to raise the debt ceiling in just a few months, at which point the Republicans hold us hostage again, for whatever they want, with no Democratic sweeteners, or they force the most horrific kind of draconian cuts to the federal government and social spending that you could possibly imagine… or both!! But I can guarantee you what won’t be cut: the GOP’s pork and the military spending that takes up 50% of the entire freaking discretionary budget, not including the war spending in Afghanistan or Iraq.
different than the ones embittered house progressive democrats are making in the papers. I don’t know if the GOP “wants to” filibuster unemployment but they are certainly want people to believe they are more than willing to do so, and you’d think if House Democrats want to call their bluff it’d be pretty easy to pass a bill in the lame duck session. But I haven’t heard any of that from any of them.
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p>Americans are struggling right now, that’s why I’m glad the president is working with the opposition to get them some relief. I missed the memo that said this stuff was going to happen anyway.
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p>He got stimulus. He got unemployment benefits And he got a complete and comprehensive neutralization of the deficit hawks, which also means he put a neat wedge between a lot of GOP rank-n-file and their leadership.
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p>And he gave the GOP a wonderful opportunity to get publicly photographed fellating their wealthy overlords.
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p>I call that getting more than he gave…
what he gave to the republicans as “their Holy Grail.”
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p>Do you think we got our “Holy Grail” back? Anything close to it?
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p>Hell, getting rid of the tax cuts for the rich was probably the #1 item on the progressive agenda. We had our Holy Grail, and Obama threw it away. Or at least is trying his best to do it.
…..trying to fit reality into a recreational game — any game.
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p>As I said in another discussion Hannah Arendt the modern “political philosopher” famously characterized “Politics as the pacific alternative to war”, and any political consultant worth their salt is conversant with military strategists back to Thucydides and his history of the Peloponnesian War
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p>Actually Boston’s own John McDonough’s book Experiencing Politics does a good job explaining and illustrating various “game” theories taught to political science(?) students.
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p>My favorite was “punctuated equilibrium”. Kidding.
Obama, in his quixotic quest to be a bipartisan president, tilting for windmills, still thinks these naked female mud-wrestling matches are co-ed… to the looks of horror of the heterosexual men who (thought they) paid good money to see this.
the people who put in office).
At the end of the day, it’s the score that matters.
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p>If you want to use a basketball metaphor, fine. Where’s the evidence to back up the idea that Obama is building up a lead? Not the polling, or the policy.
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p>45-3 is a blowout in football or basketball. I don’t care about the shape of the ball, but it’s high time we had a president who at least tried to score.
… al metaphors end up sucking…
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p>My point was less to compare politics with any sport (though did do a little of that…) and more to try to understand what people expect to see and how that might affect an emotional response to what they do see.
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p>Also, too, Obama is an athlete who is drawn to one sport over another, and the things that are salient about that sport might be, in some way, what’re salient about Obama…
I recognize the point people have in calling this unserious … but we’re entitled to a bit of fun now and then.
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p>The main gap, the main difference, is generational. Obama was in the Senate just long enough to know how stolid and intractable it can be. He served in the Senate under a president who brooked no compromise, and he watched his Democratic colleagues fold under pressure again and again.
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p>So then he became president, mounted a healthcare proposal that was a mix of his campaign proposal and Hillary’s and the John Edwards plan — Remember the flame wars over the differences? One plan allowed people to opt out (Obama’s) — and watched that proposal get kicked around, called not progressive enough, etc.
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p>So this time he says — I cut the deal. You take or leave it. Inappropriate, perhaps, but a deal with some logic behind it. He defended it well on NPR yesterday.
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p>I’m willing to call that driving to the hoop over the head of the lame ducks, to mix a metaphor.
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p>Can I get this point printed on a T-shirt?
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He’s like a lone defender on a fast break. He keeps backing up until he runs out of room. Then he gets run over, but hopes the ref calls a charging foul on the GOP.
…is whether the Democratic Congressional leadership was in on the negotiations. This story is being told as a negotiation between Obama and the GOP, but what about the party that is still the majority, and will continue to be in the Senate? Were they not there to say, “Hey Mr. President, remember us?” If they weren’t in the room does that mean that the President forgot he’s not Prime Minister and thus does not automatically have the right to speak for the legislative branch of his party?
how will the deal on the table change?
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p>- Permanent tax cuts for over $250K?
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p>- A shorter extension for unemployment checks?
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p>- No extension of Obama tax giveaways/rebates/gifts…?
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p>- Some additional tax incentives for businesses to encourage growth?
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p>SO what you gotta ask yourself is one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well do ya, punk? Remember also, the majority of Americans are now in favor of continuing the tax cuts for all. And how much pressure will be on Dems to go along with whatever the Republicans propose in January (think of the pressure for each NO vote from Dems on a bill in the House and the Senate while the new tax rate infuriates American workers weekly in January, while many others wait for their unemployment checks. I don’t want this to happen but I believe that is the risk of the current proposal (which the Republicans are mostly in favor of… not me though) goes away.
if nothing gets done, we’re back to Clinton-era taxes.
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p>Does the right “feel lucky” about the sausage-making process?
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p>55% estate tax and $700 billion for 2% of the population at stake for them.
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p>I would love for the entire bill to fail and none of the items (including unemployment checks) be continued. Higher taxes for everyone!
There’s still the Senate, where we are actually the majority and can block things legitimately on an up or down vote, and of course the veto. Polling is all over the map and definitely seems to depend on how the question is asked. Article here.
But with a majority you can only stop things that you don’t want to happen from happening. You can’t make things happen that you want since there will only be 53 Democrats (down from 59) and how many of those Democrats will vote with Republicans (Manchin, Nelson… Lieberman).
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p>The tax cuts expire before the GOP takes control of the house. They can’t extend cuts AFTER they expire. They can try to enact all new ones, but they can’t extend them. The extensions MUST be made by this congress. That’s one of the reasons the GOP gave away so much. So no deals made by this congress means no deals at all
So let me clarify…
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p>- When I said Dems I actually meant Democrats.
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p>- When I said $250K I actually meant $250,000.
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p>- When I said extend I actually meant “effectively” extend the existing tax rates which we have had for the last decade to 2011 and beyond
Obama certainly marketed himself to the left an agent of significant progress, albeit a pragmatic one. I had hoped that Obama would be a pragmatic idealist, who still wouldn’t shrink from fighting for “the little guy” in the class war started by the Republicans (beginning with the “Reagan Revolution”). I find it very hard to reconcile Obama’s pre- and post-election behavior (including the tax cut deal) with my hope that he would be a pragmatic idealist, who’s basically committed to progressive goals and values. How much this doubt is a problem of substance or communication, or some combination of both, I can’t say for sure, but that it’s unclear whether Obama stands with the “little guy” is, in my view, a huge a problem, which opens the door for Republicans like Scott Brown to mis-brand themselves as populists.
haven’t played our best. Our Republican opponents have a brutal strategy that destroys the game as it keeps them in power. Most of all, they are coordinated. Their leaders–Boner, McConnell–are a joke, but they win by default. We have the demonized Nancy Pelosi, the only Democrat in a leadership position with cojones. Every movement, regardless of egalitarianism, needs a leader.
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p>A great coach (or leader) can’t turn a bunch of losers into winners, but a bad coach can turn a great team into a bunch of losers. And without a coach, you can’t have a team at all. A team is, by definition, a team. A collective organized to achieve a goal.A group of individuals, regardless of talent, rarely wins in the end. To succeed for the season, you need the head coach, the coaching staff, and the player talent. They all have to work together. They have to play as a team.
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p>We had the team–a Democratic majority–for the last two years. But aside from Nancy Pelosi, we didn’t have the leadership, and in spite of health care (if it doesn’t get neutered by regulations), we didn’t get much done. Teams rarely get things done without coaches. Movements rarely get much done without leaders.