Why the "Obama didn't fight hard enough" and "Obama got out-negotiated" memes are wrong

Megan McArdle has a great post about the realities of the bargaining situation for the healthcare bill that must be read by everybody who thinks that Obama, Reid, Pelosi etc. got rooked by the GOP and conservative dems in the negotiating process:

Krugman, and the commenters, seem to imagine that negotiation is a process where you ask for huge concessions, and then bargain your way down to splitting the difference. So naturally, the reason that liberals have ended up with nothing in the way of a public option is that they were too nice to Republicans and conservative Democrats, and did not start out demanding single payer, and the nationalization of the coal mines.

Negotiation doesn't work that way. There is a zone of possible agreement (known to those who study this sort of thing as the ZOPA). You can't negotiate your way out of that zone no matter where you start. Nor does starting from a more aggressive bargaining point always mean that you will do better in the negotiation. It can often mean you do worse, because you poison the process.
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This bill is, at this point, hideously unpopular. I'm pretty sure you've got a bunch of senators who would really, really love not to vote for it. Ultimately, the moderates had a very good alternative to negotiated agreement, and the progressives didn't, and that was crystal clear from Day 1. That meant the progressives were never, ever going to get very much. This was not a failure of political will or political skill. It was the manifestation of a political reality that has long been obvious to everyone who wasn't living in a fantasy world. If progressives decide that the lesson from this is that they haven't been sufficiently demanding and intransigent, they are going to find themselves about as popular with the rest of America as the Bush Republicans, and probably lose their party the House next year.

The other thing to note here, for folks who think Obama should have "fought harder" for the bill is that there's a very limited amount of leverage that he has over the Senators who have been the key choke points. In Nebraska, Obama is less popular than Ben Nelson - Ben Nelson repeatedly wins statewide elections in Nebraska, and Obama lost the state (other than Omaha). Obama polls below Nelson in Nebraska. If Obama went to Nebraska and went around talking about what a jerk Nelson is, the end result would not be that Ben Nelson would be replaced by a more liberal senator -- Ben Nelson would either win anyway and then work against everything else Obama does, or else liberals would stay home or vote for a non-viable 3rd party vandidate and Nelson would lose to a Republican who would be vastly more hostile to progressive policy goals than Nelson is. The same thing is pretty much true for Blanche Lincoln.

Obama has some better leverage in bluer states, but even there it's somewhat limited. In 2006, Obama backed Ned Lamont against Lieberman, and Lieberman won anyway and is now hostile to Obama. Historically, it's just very hard for even very popular presidents to purge troublesome senators from their own party. FDR tried it in 1936, at the very height of his popularity, and it was a dismal failure. A homegrown, viable primary opponent can make something happen (witness Joe Sestak pushing Arlen Specter ever-leftward in PA), but it's just not that helpful for a sitting president to get into a public pissing match with senators from his own party.

It's also critical to remember that, as big a deal as the healthcare bill is, Obama has 3 or 7 more years of governing left, and a lot he wants to accomplish- climate change, energy policy, education reform, Afghanistan and Iraq. All of those things are going to require 60 votes in the Senate- which means they'll need Lieberman, Nelson, Lincoln, etc. Would it feel great to have Obama grab Lieberman by the jowls and toss him bodily from his committee chairmanship? Sure. But one of the reasons a lot of us supported Obama for president over the hot-headed other guy was because he takes the long view.