C'mon! Really?

No sparkle ponies for you!

Today, the President proposed a freeze on wages by the federal work force.

OK.  The idea was that it will help reduce the deficit.  It won't really.  It will barely make a dent.

It's not an especially good policy, but we've been dealing with passing school budgets that fail largely because people are incensed at the raises that teachers get in a down economy.

I understand the optics of it are appealing.

To Republicans.

It's the GOP that lives to denigrate and demean the federal government.  "They're all a bunch of overpaid bureaucrats sitting on death panels and trying to get their hands on my social security blah blah blah."

I also get that this relatively meaningless gesture might be used is a pawn to negotiate with the GOP leadership on other issues.

But that's not what Obama and his team did.  They once again capitulated on a point before the GOP had made any concessions.  I swear these guys are the WORST negotiators ever.  They continually give away their best bargaining chip before they even get a single concession from the other side.

I have supported the Obama Administration as being basically competent technocrats - something I think Obama is at heart.  But for a team that ran a practically flawless campaign in 2008, they have absolutely NO clue about leveraging an advantage or negotiating from a position of relatively equality.

The Public Option was very popular in polling.  They traded it away early in order to get Nelson/Lieberman and others to support the bill.  They never tried to push for something bigger in order to get something more to their liking.  They never tried to re-frame the debate in their advantage.

Right now, the GOP has minions out there talking about defaulting on the debt ceiling.  I mean that's financial suicide.  I can't remember WHY they want to do it, probably to repeal HCR.  A reform bill which actually REDUCES the deficit over the next ten years.  Basically, they want to bully Obama around, and from what I've seen, he's not the guy to stand up to them.

Clinton turned things around in 1995 by outmaneuvering the GOP during the Shutdown.  He framed the issues in a clear way that people could understand and showed the GOP position to be heartless and unnecessary.

Obama has to learn to stop negotiating with himself and giving away his bargaining chips before the GOP even gets to the table.  They will eat him alive if he doesn't start taking his own swings.

Why, in the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt has he not been flogging the airwaves over extending JUST the middle class tax cut?  What the hell does he believe in?

This lament was true of Clinton, too.  I seldom knew what Clinton's core beliefs were.  Sadly, we all know what Bush's core beliefs were, and they were crazy and wrong.  I guess there's some tactical advantage in being pragmatic before everything.

But FDR was a pragmatist, too.  And he also knew how to throw a crushing haymaker.  And from a wheelchair, no less.

These times demand an FDR, not a Clinton.

Because if he doesn't get up off the floor and start fighting for stuff that he believes in, we'll be looking at the Palin Administration in 2012, and that could possibly be the end of America as we know it.