Republicans Always Have the Advantage in Compromise

[louis c]

You see, they don't won't government to work and we do.

So when a guy like Reagan gets to be President, there were no qualms about deficit spending. During his first two years the Democratic controlled Congress happily increased spending to create millions of public sector jobs at every level. Keynesian economics worked just fine, because, you see, we believe in government and we don't care who gets the credit when we help people. When George Bush Jr. wanted to spend like there was no tomorrow and VP Cheney said that deficits "didn't matter", the Democrats, who left a surplus under Clinton, didn't filibuster the national debt ceiling. We played it straight. If there weren't the votes, there weren't the votes.

Republicans will always have the advantage because they want government to fail, especially these teabaggers. This is a whole new breed (or a reincarnation of the old breed of Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society).

I negotiate for a living. Our union contract actually makes negotiating within the framework of a Collective Bargaining Agreement almost a daily occurrence. We compromise all the time and have a relatively smoothly run operation, because, you see, we want the whole thing to work.

In order to compromise successfully, you need a willing partner. One who wants the organization to succeed. If one of those partners would rather see the whole thing fail, you have a hard time compromising.

[MyshkinCommaPrince]

1. They want to burn the house down.

We want to add another wing to the house. They want to burn it down, destroy it so they can build a parking lot. We compromise by burning down only a portion of the house.

Umm. Prob'ly a crummy metaphor, but I'm not the brightest person in the lamp, y'know.