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This appeared at Huffington Post on October 1, 2009.
If I determine the enemy’s disposition of forces while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it. — Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The debate I identified during the Netroots Nation conference as “process realism versus process idealism” has heated up ever since. There’s been a lot of blog-based vitriol aimed at Rahm Emmanuel, Barack Obama, and the White House by progressives. In particular, too much electronic ink has been spilled over conflicting signals about the public option.
But as I said a few weeks ago, mixed signals are a deliberate strategy. Last Friday at DailyKos, Maimonides described this better than I have:
Rumor in DC* is that Rahm has gotten exactly what he wanted: a “Big mess,” as Rahm reportedly described it. Formlessness has payed off. There are virtually no Congressional players left whose opinions we do not know, and every option has been talked to death. And now the Administration, rather than having its policies debated to death, has the ability to sweep in and choose among the options presented. The publicly available options one might say.
And they did this by keeping the fight, the mess, largely contained in the Legislature, that hallowed institution where they make the sausage that the President later cooks up in a Rose Garden signing. They get what they want, they get to claim the victory, and they kept their hands remarkably clean, by keeping the American people from perceiving them as having lost the argument. They’ll need that for the next issue. And the next one. Because they aren’t just interested in delivering quality, affordable health care to every American. They’re interested in modernizing energy policy, they’re interested in signing bills repealing DOMA and DADT, they’re interested in reforming regulation of Wall Street and reducing our nuclear stockpile. They have a lot of work ahead of them.
They are facing an endless series of battles like this one. And from my POV they plan to win them all. (Emphasis mine)
The term “11-Dimensional Chess” has risen in the progressive blogosphere as a dismissive term for Obama’s approach. In a Friday post, Booman Tribune questions this canard:
My short answer to this critique is that the health care bill is multi-dimensional and any strategy would have to reflect that. Start with the fact that the health care bill has to pass through three House and two Senate committees, all with their own unique membership and temperaments. That’s five dimensions. Then, consider that the three House bills have to be condensed into one House bill and the two Senate bills have to be condensed into one Senate bill. That’s seven dimensions. After that, each bill has to pass through its respective house of Congress. That’s nine dimensions. Then those two bills have to be melded into one bill and sent back to pass each house of Congress again. That’s eleven dimensions (or, maybe, twelve dimensions). (Emphasis mine)
At TalkLeft, the blogger who coined the term “11-Dimensional Chess” responds:
President Obama has been a bystander in the creation of this situation. At this point, that is a good thing. But the persons claiming “He’s got it” were obviously wrong and the phrase “11 dimensional chess” entirely appropriate for their analysis, such as it was.
In other words, if health care reform does contain a “public option,” it will be because Obama is made to do it by progressives, not because of his superb playing of 11 dimensional chess.
Yet, as I said weeks ago, Obama’s biggest challenge has been the mobilization of his own political base. Progressive grassroots organizing was lethargic at best until the August teabagging hit a crescendo. And he was out there the entire time telling Americans about the public option.
Then there was the strange rhythm of my inbox. Every pronouncement of doom for the public option “leaked” from the White House was matched by another email from Democracy For America asking for money and support to build momentum for the public option. A chorus of oh noes would ring throughout the blogosphere and everyone would redouble their efforts to awaken support.
And it worked. Contrary to what some progressives may tell themselves, they were goaded into action by Obama — not the other way around.
Observers seem to have missed an important facet of Obama’s address to Congress: unlike Clinton’s disaster in 1993, by that point Congressional Democrats were begging Obama to take ownership of a plan. That would not have happened had he “under-learned” the lesson of Clinton’s failed health care push in 1993.
Yet even as Obama made a strong case for the public option in his speech, some progressives still worried that he had not drawn a “bright line in the sand” on the issue. That Obama firmly stood behind the 80% of reform to which Congress could agree, while maintaining some plausible flexibility over a public option, speaks again to this strategy of letting debate play out in Congress.
As Booman says, there are so many moving parts to this story that a simplistic view isn’t helpful. Today, Booman recaps the conundrum Obama resolved with that Sun Tzu-like formlessness:
If he announced that he wouldn’t sign anything without a public option, the bill would get nowhere in the Finance Committee, and the effort to pass a bill without resorting to the budget reconciliation process would die an early death, with the administration taking the blame for their intransigence. But, if he dropped his support for the public option, the Democratic Party and all their health care activists would lose their enthusiasm for reform. The only solution was to maintain a degree of creative ambiguity. In not insisting on a public option, he could maintain the narrative that he was flexible and willing to negotiate and make concessions to the Republicans. (Emphasis mine)
Let’s also remember Obama’s debate performances against Hillary Clinton. In almost all of them, he won by deferring to let her go first. In much the same way, his speech coming at the end of the August silly season gave him the last word while the Republicans were on the record as “the party of no” and “death panels.”
Since his speech, all the momentum has been with the public option. Twenty-four House Blue Dogs endorsed it Monday. It failed two votes in the Senate Finance Committee, but there are enough votes to pass it in the Senate when it gets reinserted in the sausage-making. Polls now show overwhelming support for it and disapproval of Republican intransigence — statistics that caused NYT columnist Charles Blow to muse that Obama has “outsmarted us all.”
Moreover, this “formlessness” strategy shows up again in other areas. Writing on Afghanistan this Sunday, Frank Rich lauds the way Obama
has temporarily pressed the pause button to think it through while others, including some of his own generals, try to lock him in is not a sign of indecisiveness but of confidence and strength.
Monday morning Defense Secretary Gates was telling us the administration will likely not meet its self-imposed deadline to close Guantanamo. That afternoon, Reuters reported that 75 more detainees have been cleared for release.
Sunday, David Corn reported at Mother Jones that White House insiders were signaling the Copenhagen round of climate change talks was dead on arrival, only to be rebuffed by the insiders he quoted.
Lowered expectations again. How many times will this pattern repeat itself before progressives realize it’s a strategy?
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