Want to take a wild guess on how the “supercommittee” is going? (via Steve B.)

The new deficit-reduction plan from a majority of Democrats on the congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (the “supercommittee”) marks a dramatic departure from traditional Democratic positions — and actually stands well to the right of plans by the co-chairs of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission and the Senate’s “Gang of Six,” and even further to the right of the plan by the bipartisan Rivlin-Domenici commission.

The Democratic plan contains substantially smaller revenue increases than those bipartisan proposals while, for example, containing significantly deeper cuts in Medicare and Medicaid than the Bowles-Simpson plan. The Democratic plan features a substantially higher ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases than any of the bipartisan plans.

And of course it was rejected. Benen speculates that the offer was never serious in the first place, that it was purely to try to gain points for trying. I sure hope so–this is greatly inferior from what we’d get from the default option if the supercommittee fails.

I’ve been thinking recently about the trainwreck that has been the past ten months. It’s been of a definite pattern. Democrats have been desperate to strike a deal, any deal, with Republicans on deficits, presumably in order to help neutralize the “big spender” tag. Republicans have been equally desperate not to strike any deal with Democrats in order to show the Tea Party that they’re opposed to a deal on any terms, regardless of what those terms might be. Follow this with a round of Democrats saying, “The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther!” before retreating behind the line. For a party whose morale has been in the toilet for as long as I can remember–possibly since mid-2009–this is such a weird, dispiriting strategy to follow. And yet follow it they do, over and over. At some point, one has to wonder why.

In my opinion, this is partly due to building a political strategy around making a deal with Republicans. This effectively means that you surrender the initiative and put it into the hands of the opposition party to block it, which makes them the protagonist of our little story. This was done evidently with some very starry-eyed notions of what the modern GOP will and will not do. I can sort of understand why Democrats are so desperate to strike some deal (Republican aversion to something like what was just offered continues to be nutty to me), but what’s remarkable is the lack of strategic thinking by the Democrats. Where’s the backup plan? What if nothing is accepted? Democrats get caught flatfooted on this stuff, which shouldn’t happen with questions this basic. So often this year it’s seemed to me as though Democrats from the leadership on down have lost the thread, that there’s little sense of an agenda being advanced or even really proposed. Almost like the party with a hold on the White House and half of Congress is acting the part of an opposition party. Case in point, the idea of making deep cuts to Medicare while simultaneously trying to run against Paul Ryan’s budget plan as defenders of Medicare doesn’t really wash, you have to have political geniuses manning the fort to do something like that, and our party certainly doesn’t have that. Why do this at all? Part of this stems from a pathological inability to make choices. I mean, how important is the deficit issue to Democrats? What do they give up for it, where do they draw the line? What is that line? These are questions that should have been asked and answered last year after the election. And yet, it all still appears to be up in the air. There’s no seeming set of priorities from one month to the next, what is acceptable or not shifts constantly. This isn’t about whether or not this policy orientation is wrong (though I think it is, at least until we have a stable recovery on our hands), it’s about having a policy orientation. Governing parties make choices and pursue objectives. Opposition parties hop around from one issue to the next, hoping to somehow make something happen somewhere, without any sort of leitmotif occurring in there. Admittedly, Republicans managed to make many Democratic priorities politically unpopular (thanks to a big assist from the recession), which complicates that agenda. But sometimes, to quote Martin Sheen from Apocalypse Now, I see no evidence of any method at all.

Thankfully, the White House’s attitude seems to be shifting in a better direction, and now it looks as though they’re trying to advance something resembling an agenda with what levers they have access to (i.e. unilaterally). But that only came after a catastrophic failure called the debt ceiling crisis and seems to cut deeply against the tendencies of much of the party, which continues to very much think that this “opposition strategy while in power” sort of thing is good strategy. They say you have to think like a winner to become a winner. I could think of worse places for Democrats to start.