Strategy, Tactics, or Neither

Ever since I first heard about the now infamous compromise between the President and the Republican leadership while watching Wake Up with Al on The Weather Channel, I have been pondering, as many have, the implications of this deal for the two parties and for America as a whole. In that time, I have most heard nothing but ire coming from Democrats and liberals, who see in this back-door deal a betrayal, a blackmail, and a capitulation. Of the various things I've read and seen, I think, perhaps, the best was from Keith Olbermann.

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Despite the barely contained fury, I think that Mr Olbermann offered a sane and thoughtful analysis, an amazingly difficult tightrope to walk. However, while I think his approach a reasonable and useful one, I do not, ultimately, agree.

In military philosophy, a distinction is made between tactical and strategic considerations. Tactics occur on the field of battle and involve the deployment and use of men and materiel in the heat of the fight. Strategy encompasses the larger view of both the battle at hand and the campaign that leads up to and away from it. Tactics involve squads and platoons; strategies move armies.

And I think, in this matter, that few are thinking strategically, while most are bogged down in tactics. This is as true of the Republicans, if not truer, than it is of the Democrats. The Republican Party has not thought strategically about much of anything in decades, and their habit of tactical thinking has led them into quagmire after quagmire, has forced them into alliances that have served them only in the short run and not the long, and has forced them to be endlessly combative, even when combat was no longer to their advantage.

And this is the problem that I have with the critiques that are being leveled against the President, at least in the matter of the tax cuts. The view presented is strictly tactical, and those tactics are not supported and cradled in an overall strategy.

Yes, the rich have gotten their precious tax cuts extended--for two years, not forever--and everyone else got their rates cut too. Social Security withholding will be trimmed as well and those unemployed will be able to collect for as many as thirteen months more. The problem with looking at this tactically is that the tendency is to see it as being mostly about taxes when it is, at bottom, a second round of stimulus. Mr Olbermann worries about unemployment benefits running out in 13 months, which is noble and compassionate. However, isn't better, in the long run, to get people off unemployment and back into jobs? And that is the crux of this compromise. The goal is to strengthen the recovery and to create more jobs so that a smaller safety net will do.

Yes, we will be borrowing to make this happen, some from China and some from our own future, but that is what you do in hard times. Build debt when times are tough and pay it down when times are flush. And you can either increase spending or reduce revenues, but the money has to come from somewhere. It won't just magically appear. The wealthiest will get wealthier still and will horde the money that doesn't go to taxes that might have. That is their nature and their day of reckoning will come, have no doubt. It just won't be right now.

Everyone else will spend their pittances while the greedy rich save their piles, and the middle class, as usual, will be the engine that drives the recovery. And as things improve and more people find their way back to one payroll or another, revenues will also improve and things will get better, and these hard times will slowly become those hard times, and the need to provide for those without will be less pressing and no longer held hostage to extending tax cuts for the wealthiest. In two years, with an improved economy, Barack Obama can be reelected President and the gains that the Republicans made in Congress either mitigated or overturned, and the shoe will be on the other foot. This is the strategy.

There is also the matter that the Republicans, who swept to their gains in the House by pledging to reduce deficits will have made their first order of business extending the deficit by their kneejerk insistence on underwriting the excesses of the wealthiest one percent. No, that won't come back to bite them in the ass. Not much it won't. Another tactical win and strategic defeat.

At least, that's how I see it.

Of course, it is difficult to see all this when the President is so endlessly po-faced following the November elections. He seems to think that someone somewhere was handed some sort of a mandate, when they were not. Large groups of people work on principles closely related to those of fluid mechanics. The blocks of voters that people like to talk about are more like rivulets and streams of them and the sentiments of the polity shift like the sediment and shoals of the Mississippi.

I'll leave you with this. All the talk about what the November elections meant reminds me of this scene from Citizen Kane. "You talk about the People as though you own them." Sometimes Jedidiah was right.