Ezra Klein on the subtext of some of Barack Obama's jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Yeah, I think there may have been more point to some of those lines than was immediately apparent.
It has become an odd "talking point" that the president should be doing more to deal with a Republican congress that assures its supporters that they won't deal with him except maybe to arrange his surrender terms. I keep being reminded of the 1985 Writers Guild strike. Our negotiating committee went in to present demands and proposals to the producers' representatives. The producers' representatives handed our negotiators a take-it-or-leave-it offer (a very bad one) and left the room. Their position was that there would be no negotiations nor would they even listen to our proposals. This is a strategy that sometimes has worked rather well for them but when it doesn't, we get long strikes because it takes a long time for them to budge from that position.
During the strike, I kept running into writers who felt we'd been months walking picket lines because our leaders didn't know how to bargain. I kept having conversations that went like this…
OTHER PERSON: They should get in there and negotiate.
ME: Negotiate? With whom?
OTHER PERSON: With the producers, with the other side. You get in there and you establish a dialogue.
ME: They're refusing to talk with us.
OTHER PERSON: Then you make them talk to us. You establish a dialogue. You get in there and bargain.
ME: How do you do this?
OTHER PERSON: I keep telling you. You establish a dialogue. You sit down with them and present ideas to them.
You wouldn't believe how often I had that conversation. Eventually, our Chief Negotiator had some back-channel conversations with their Chief Negotiator and when the strike had gone on for a while and the producers were looking for a way to budge without appearing to budge, something was worked out. But there was never that head-to-head bargaining where they accept something we offer and give us something for it. The producers felt that to just listen to us was to lose. Just as a lot of Republicans want to be able to go back to their constituents and brag that they didn't negotiate with Obama.