The process of negotiation is not exactly mysterious. We are all familiar with it and have witnessed it or participated it in countless times.

Imagine that you are buying a used car. The sticker says $14,995, and you are fairly confident that it would make sense to buy it if you can get it for $12,500. What do you do? You certainly don't offer $12,500 at the outset because you know full well what will happen if you do. You will end up paying more than that because you have left yourself no room for negotiation. Instead, you might start at $9,500 with the goal of getting to $12,500 at the end.

For reasons I cannot comprehend, the Democratic Party does not seem to understand negotiation. We saw a disturbing example of this during the debate over health care reform. The initial Republican position was that nothing should change. They wanted to defeat any efforts at reform, so no change at all would have been a complete success. Instead of starting from what would have been a complete success for them (i.e., Medicare for all) and hoping to end up somewhere in the middle, the Democratic Party did something strange. They voluntarily threw out the ideal.

If you remember how the negotiations played out, the Democrats started with a very weak sort of public option. Even if they had ultimately achieved this, it would have been an imperfect solution. But by starting here, they ensured they would never get it. They have actually seemed surprised when those of us on the left criticized the "reform" on which they have tried to sell us.

What are we to conclude from this? Is the Democratic Party thoroughly inept when it comes to basic negotiation? Did they not really want a public option? I'm not sure which is worse, and it now appears that we are going down a similar road with the debate over the budget and debt ceiling.

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