In a blog post today on Forbes, blogger Victoria Pynchon of She Negotiates interviews Carrie Menkel-Meadow on the debt crisis negotiations.
As Menkel-Meadow explains, the current political crisis demonstrates that where self-interest (or party-interest) dominates (if we can’t rule, we’ll ruin) negotiation seeking integrative solutions or bargaining for trades and compromises may be difficult to impossible.
According to Menkel-Meadow, the ill conceived desire to grab “self” or party interest – no new taxes even at the expense of the polity and economy generally – appears to be over-powering the GOP’s desire to work with the Democrats for a mutually beneficial resolution of the budget crisis. Says Menkel-Meadow, “this implicates all of the recent work (Margalit, Mnookin) on negotiating with the devil or with evil.”
Saying it can’t be done, however, is not a solution Menkel-Meadow is willing to live with. She suggests that the real stakeholders – the American public – be brought into the public sphere for the purpose of making common ground interests more clear to those who would exchange America’s economic well-being for ideological purity.
For the rest of the post, link here. I agree with Carrie that Obama’s appeal to the U.S. public seems to be his best option as well as her opinion that negotiations in DC seem not to follow any reasonable negotation strategy whatsoever!
