The First Annual Donald Trump Award For Incompetence In The Field Of Negotiation: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema

 As I understand it, the younger generation was raised with the social model in which "everybody gets a trophy," thereby devaluing awards in pursuit of that all-important lifetime goal, self-esteem.  Self-esteem plus a nickel being worth either a nickel, or perhaps slightly less, if self-esteem causes one to mis-allocate a nickel.  The phenomenon is likely overstated, even if it contains a kernel of truth, and the same can likely be said of any potential consequences.  I have never bothered to read any rigorous empirical work on the subject because frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.  However, amid the surfeit of awards bestowed upon so many as to inflate the value of the concept, perhaps I can either contribute my share to award inflation, or better yet, introduce an award with some real meaning.  It's the First Annual Donald Trump Award For Incompetence In The Field Of Negotiation!

While the title of this post has already given away the winner of the award, let us consider he who has inspired the award.  Mr. Trump.  Sir.  (He likes it when you call him that, and I'm nothing if not polite.  Therefore, I am nothing.  Behold, I am becoming a Buddhist, or something.)  Anyway, Donald Trump was bad at everything except embodying rage.  Alas, that has been enough to create the most intense and stable personality cult in American history, because there are a lot of fucked up people in this country, but basically, Trump is a nincompoop.  He is bad at business, and he was bad at any policy-making function within politics.  Quick-- name every major bill he got passed in his term.  What do you have?

He got a tax cut.  Well... McConnell and Ryan got a tax cut, and really, with unified Republican control, a tax cut should have been a no-brainer.  We weren't even talking about a 50-50 Senate.  They had functional control.  So, they cut taxes.  What role did the master negotiator play?  Almost none.  Basically, any time Donnie-boy tried to insert himself into the process, Paulie and Mitch told him to get the fuck out of the room because nothing good ever came of Trump being in the room.

The bill itself was basically written on the floor of the Senate, at the last minute, quite literally on the margins of the page as they prepared to vote.  Yes, hand-written notes, on the physical page itself.  That's actually how they wrote the fucking bill at the end.  That's not supposed to be what "marking up" the bill means, but Congress is fucked up, and nobody has fucked it up more than the GOP, so that's what happened.  And Donnie-boy had nothin' to do with it.

Frankly, he didn't know or care what was in the bill.  He doesn't know anything, and he just wanted a bill to sign.  Grover Norquist, who once mattered, used to say that all the GOP really needed was a president with enough "working digits" to handle a pen to sign a bill cutting taxes.  Donald Trump has literally that much cognitive capacity and no more.  He's a fucking dumbass.  Ryan and McConnell knew that, so they kept him out of the loop.  Here.  Have a hooker to play with.  She's already signed her NDA, and she won't press charges.  Now stay out of the way, dipshit.

Anyway, once the House flipped, Trump couldn't do anything.  He kept trying to negotiate, but he failed at everything.  The first thing he did was shut down the fucking government.  Over Christmas.  (Cue Alan Rickman.)  And why was he so bad at any attempt to negotiate?

Because nobody could nail him down to a single, fucking position.  Nobody ever knew what he actually wanted.

Not even him.  He was too fucking stupid to understand public policy, so he had no real policy preferences, aside from self-enrichment and core xenophobia.  Once you move away from that, though, he's too clueless.  So, you take this walking avatar of the Dunning-Kruger effect who doesn't know a thing, but thinks he's the universal expert on everything, and stick him in a negotiation, and what happens?  What happens is this.  He can express a position, but any position he expresses at any given point in time will be what Phil Converse called a "non-attitude," which is the term we use in political science for a position one states that does not indicate a real, underlying belief, stated merely to avoid admitting that one doesn't have a real opinion, because such an admission would be embarrassing.  In survey research, this comes up all the time.  Suppose I conduct a survey asking people about "qualified immunity."  Most people don't really know what that is, or how it works, so they don't have real opinions on it.  That won't stop them from answering my question, though!  Those responses are "non-attitudes."  How do we know when we are observing a non-attitude?  In part, non-attitudes are unstable responses.  Ask a person again, and you get a different answer.

That's Donnie Trump.  All of his positions are non-attitudes.  Except "Donald Trump is god, his enemies must be smitten," and throw in something racist/misogynist.  Actual public policy?  He can't have policy positions because he doesn't know anything.  Well, OK, I'll amend that to say that he is very confident in his idiotically mercantilist beliefs, which we debunked centuries ago, but that doesn't really speak to anything positive about him.  But anyway, moving on.

Here's the problem.  If he doesn't have any real beliefs, and everything he says is a non-attitude, then what happens in a negotiation?  Congressional negotiators say, "here's our proposal, what's your counterproposal?"  Trump may make a counterproposal or demand, but there is no real attitude behind it, and hence his position will be totally different the next day.  Worse, on those rare occasions when Trump does stand behind his proposal, the knowledge that he is so inconsistent, as a consequence of being such a lying, bullshitting fuckwit, the other negotiating party will just discount it anyway, and the whole thing falls apart.  That's why Trump never got a fucking thing.  The master negotiator was a total failure.  Not just because he's a lying idiot-- which he is-- but because nobody can ever establish what his demand is.  The old saying goes, "nailing jello to the wall."  That's Donnie Trump.  Terrible negotiator.

So there is a lesson.  There are many ways to be a bad negotiator, but one stands proud.  Proud as a toxic mushroom, full of itself, craving attention for the sake of attention, and infuriating to everyone for no fucking reason except narcissism and bile.  Yet without actually have a coherent demand!

There is a long legislative history of such shittiness, and as one who bemoans the far right and the far left, a casual perusal of some of my commentary might presume that I do the dance of the centrist worship.  Actually, I can't stand most congressional "centrists."  Preening egotists and unprincipled hacks, angling for that sweet, sweet media endorsement.

Most of them are shitty negotiators.  But as we consider the recipient of the First Annual Donald Trump Award, let us revisit some past negotiating tactics by these preening egotists and unprincipled hacks.

The year was 2009.  The potential presidency of one, Donald J. Trump was still nothing more than a laugh line rather than an existential threat to the concept of democracy, and my students didn't have their eyes glued to smartphones every second of every day.  Pop music sucked then, as now.  Anyway, a Democratic president rummaged the archives of a right-wing think tank called The Heritage Foundation and found a healthcare plan, put into law by a Republican Governor in Massachusetts.  His party introduced this plan into Congress as legislation, so obviously, the GOP freaked the fuck out.

But this isn't a story about them.  Fuck them.

This is a story about three assholes in the Democratic Party.  Three former Senators.  Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and... Joe... Lieberman.

Nelson represented Nebraska, Landrieu represented Louisiana, and Lieberman represented the GOP Connecticut.  You may note that Nebraska and Louisiana are not exactly Dem-friendly territory.  They weren't in 2009, and they aren't now.  So how do you get Nelson and Landrieu to vote for an unpopular bill in states that are particularly hostile to that bill?

Buy them the fuck off.

So here was the deal.  The Senate was 60-40 at the time.  Well, it was 60-40 after Arlen Specter switched parties because he was afraid to face a Republican primary as the GOP began its descent into true madness with the "Tea Party."  That meant they could invoke cloture if they kept every Democrat on board.  That meant giving every Democrat in the Senate exactly what they wanted.

Sound familiar?

Nelson and Landrieu needed cash.  Cash on the barrelhead, baby.  The short version is that Harry Reid, then Majority Leader of the Senate, just threw cash at them with some sweetheart deals that got called "the Cornhusker kickback," and the "Louisiana Purchase."  But it worked.  Nelson and Landrieu got their provisions, and voted for cloture.

The real sticking point was that fucking asshole, Joe Lieberman.  What, exactly, did he want?  60-40.  That thing wasn't gonna pass unless every Democrat voted for cloture.  Reid was no disciplinarian, and the Senate doesn't have strong disciplinary tools anyway.  This was all about leverage.  Every single Democrat was "pivotal," in the language of voting models, and if you want a fuller treatment of that state, I did one in my second book, Incremental Polarization: A Unified Spatial Theory of Legislative Elections, Parties & Roll Call Voting (Oxford University Press, 2018).

From a negotiating standpoint, though, if you are pivotal, you have a lot of power.  Nelson and Landrieu used that position, and that power, to make clear demands.

Lieberman?  He didn't actually have a concrete demand.  Nobody could figure out what he wanted because he didn't really have a concrete demand.  He represented Connecticut, which was a Dem-friendly state, and mostly, he wanted to preen about how centrist he was, and blah-fucking-blah.

Here's an example of what that asshole did.  Previously, he had advocated lowering the age of Medicare eligibility, as a buy-in.  He actually advocated that, as a policy.  So, congressional negotiators went to him and said, hey, here's your thing.  Your own proposal.  What if we put this in the bill?  Would that get your support?

Easy, right?

Here's what happened.  A bunch of lefties, including... um... Anthony Weiner (in his pre-creepy days), said, "hey, we love this policy!"  Lieberman heard that the left liked the idea, and so he rejected his own proposal for the sake of disagreeing with the left.

Seriously.  He admitted that.  On camera.  All he fucking cared about was sticking it to the left.

How do you negotiate with someone whose only goal is to disagree with you?  It's kinda hard, no?

It's the old game, from game theory:  matching pennies.  Two players, each player simultaneously puts a penny, either heads-up or tails-up.  If the coins are placed with the identical side up, Player 1 wins the two coins.  If the coins don't match, Player 2 wins the two coins.  There are no pure strategy equilibria.  Reid was trying to agree.  Lieberman was trying to disagree.

And the basic problem was that Lieberman didn't have a policy.  He rejected his own policy.  He just wanted to disagree with the left.

Nelson and Landrieu?  They needed a buy-off.  Why?  Nebraska.  Louisiana.  I get that.  If you're honest, you get that.  OK, sure, fine.  Lieberman?  He was just a fucking asshole.

As a post-script to this story, here's what happened to the Cornhusker kickback and the Louisiana Purchase.  The House passed its version of a bill without the Cornhusker kickback or the Louisiana Purchase (no Nelson or Landrieu in that chamber), the Senate passed its version, and before the House and Senate could reconcile, Ted Kennedy died.  A special election was held to replace Kennedy, and a Republican won that election.  (Scott Brown.)  Brown campaigned on an explicit promise to vote against cloture for any House-Senate conference bill, so the versions couldn't be reconciled.

The only way to pass Obamacare was for the House to pass the unamended Senate bill.  So instead of a House-Senate conference, the House passed the Senate's version, and then they did a budget reconciliation bill to amend it in lieu of a House-Senate conference, and the thing is, the House didn't like the Cornhusker kickback or the Louisiana Purchase, and once you're in budget reconciliation territory, you only need 51 votes.

So, the House passed the Senate's version of the bill, with the Cornhusker kickback and Louisiana Purchase, and Obamacare was signed into law.  Then, the House and Senate did a budget reconciliation bill which, among other things, repealed the Cornhusker kickback and Louisiana purchase.  Nelson and Landrieu both voted no, but it was too late.  Their votes were unnecessary at that point anyway, so they just got fucked.

In a weird way, then, Lieberman got exactly what he wanted, which was to preen and make himself the center of attention and make everyone jump through hoops, and Nelson and Landrieu got fucked.  The thing is, Nelson and Landrieu only got fucked by the weird sequence of what happened with Obamacare, which was largely a consequence of Ted Kennedy dying and being replaced by Scott Brown.  Without that, the House and Senate bills would have gone to conference, and the resulting bill still would have needed Nelson and Landrieu's votes, so they couldn't have stripped out the Louisiana Purchase and Cornhusker kickbacks.  There isn't really a broader lesson in that except that weird shit happens.

And with respect to Lieberman, well, he did make himself the center of attention, and made everyone jump through hoops, but did he get anything?  No.  Because he had no demands.  He had all the leverage in the world, and not a fucking clue what to do with it.

Which leads us to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-her own sphincterAZ, actually, what's the difference?).  Why am I not writing about Joe Manchin?  Because Joe Manchin, much as he pisses off you fucking lefties, makes clear demands.  He represents West Virginia, he wants to keep winning there, and he tries to negotiate the complicated politics of being a nominal Democrat from West Virginia.  He's just doing the Nelson/Landrieu thing.  No, he's not going to support your fucking commie bills.  Do I like him?  No, but I don't like anyone.  You get that, right?  The point is, there is a clear process of negotiating with him, just as there was a clear process of negotiating with Nelson and Landrieu in 2009 and 2010 for the ACA.

Sinema?  Like Joe Lieberman, she has all the political power in the world, and not a fucking clue in the world what to do with it.  Why are the Democrats more pissed at her than at Joe Manchin?  Because they don't know what her position is.  They go to her with proposals, she says no without making a counterproposal or counterdemand, and Democrats are left in the same negotiating position they had when dealing with Donald Fucking Trump.  Jello, sliding down the wall, staring up at that nail and laughing at it, extending something like a middle finger, to the degree that pseudo-sentient gelatin can extend a middle finger at wall fixtures.

The thing is, Sinema is even worse than Lieberman.  Lieberman directly stated that his goal was to disagree with the left.  I mean, that's stupid and shitty, and makes negotiation very close to impossible, but at least he fucking said it out loud.  I'm a political scientist.  I study these assholes for a living.  If you asked me what Kyrsten Sinema wants, I couldn't tell you.

Which means, she is as abstruse and impenetrable in her demands as Donald Fucking Trump.

Now, here's what that means.  It means that the political world must jump through hoops to accommodate here.  Congress is nothing but a numbers game.  Yet she is fucking everything up.  When you give power to an imbecile, bad things happen, and there are many varieties of bad things.  One of them is that everything grinds to a standstill as a party tries to enact its agenda and cannot because one idiot/asshole doesn't even know what she wants.

If she did, she'd get it!  The world is her fucking oyster.  All she needs to do is figure out what oyster she wants.

But no.

Hence, as the committee reviewed all nominees for the First Annual Donald Trump Award For Incompetence In The Field Of Negotiation, we realized there could be only one winner.  This is not an everybody-gets-a-trophy scenario.  No, Kyrsten.  You are our true winner, making everyone else a loser.  The awards committee also has some very specific suggestions about where you can place this award.

In conclusion, please go away.

And now... sure, we're calling this "music."  Ruins, "Negotiation," from Burning Stone.  Youtube didn't have the track isolated, but it had the full album, so I embedded it to start at 40:33, which is when "Negotiation" starts.  Yeah, um... Yeah.