Bad Strategy and Double-Crosses

Yglesias makes a couple good points about the failure of the bailout bill. I especially agree that Paulson isn’t getting nearly enough blame for having completely botched the process at the start. Paulson’s initial proposal reminds me of the great scene in A Civil Action where Schlichtmann opens up settlement negotiations with an utterly outrageous proposal, which rather than bringing a counter-offer simply causes the other parties to walk away from the table, starting a spiral that would lead to him losing his shirt although he had a good case against one of the defendants. While an initial proposal should be more than you think you can get, Paulson’s proposal was so baldly indefensible that it made getting even an improved plan passed much more difficult, and initial negotiations should have occurred in private.

I think this is also right:

The House conservatives who sank the bailout didn’t do so because they were listening to loud and angry voices. They sank the plan by accident. They were trying to double-cross the Democrats. First, they wrung lots of concessions out of Democrats at the negotiating table as the price for delivering 80 votes. Then, by not delivering 80 votes and forcing Pelosi to pass the bill as a partisan Democratic bill, they were going to wage a demagogic anti-bailout campaign. But Pelosi refused to be played for a sucker and so the conservative inadvertently sank a bill that, all evidence suggests, they actually wanted to pass. They just wanted to vote “no” on it for short-term political gain.

It seems pretty obvious that if Boehner can’t get enough of the people sharing his clown car to vote for a bill, then the Dems simply need to pass a better bill and take responsibility for it (since they’ll get it anyway.) If the GOP wants to make a big issue out of maintaining stringent bankruptcy laws in this economic climate, let ’em.