I’ve long maintained that President Obama needs to be wise about choosing his battles. I applauded him for compromising on the Bush Tax Cuts in exchange for some additional stimulus. I’ve been critical of him for letting himself get rolled on the debt ceiling issue, for what I consider to be purely political (and misguided) reasons. Setting up a confrontation with the GOP by trying to undercut a Republican debate was a bizarre choice to me–it seems to me that Obama would want people to get an earful of Republican nuttiness, not hide it? It comes off as needlessly confrontational, and I’m glad he stepped down first.

If you visit TPM, there are a few people emailing in who are upset at Obama for caving on this. I’m not. I’ve never wanted confrontation for confrontation’s sake, which I think is what a lot of liberals want at this point, whether they admit it or not. What I want is smart confrontation. The Republicans are the ones who want confrontation for confrontation’s sake (tell me I’m wrong), and maneuvering them into a position of heavily opposing very popular items should not be very hard. Put simply, the adults are not running the show, and Republicans’ “strength” is just bravado hiding a nearly pathological fear that everything they care about is falling apart. If you view it as ostentatious shows of strength hiding intense fear and alienation, then their typical behavior makes sense. But merely standing up for your principles is not a test of strength alone. To stand up for something without ever thinking about it, without ever engaging the substance of the other side’s case, is no strength. It means you think that Nathan Bedford Forrest behaved more admirably than James Longstreet after the Civil War. Which, in my opinion, is a hard case to make.

I don’t need to have the feeling that Obama wins every single skirmish in order not to give up on him. The Union lost tons of battles in the Civil War and, as Gore Vidal noted in Lincoln, made just about every mistake he could have made. But Lincoln had a plan and a goal, and worked nonstop to try to achieve it. To the extent I see Obama as having an attainable goal and a plan to get there, I don’t sweat the small stuff. What’s worried me very much recently is the sense that bipartisanship has moved from being the plan to being the goal. What’s weirded me out about this is that it stinks of Village Conventional Wisdom that the people just hate partisan bickering and prefer civility, not that people despise politicians because they don’t represent them or talk about stuff that matters to them. The indications are that Obama is planning a course change, with a substantial jobs push. That’s the confrontation that matters to me. When a speech is given, not so much.