RACIAL politics were a lot more charged back in 1991, when Derrick Bell, then a professor at Harvard law school, went on strike to demand the hiring of a black woman faculty member, and at the same moment inadvertently launched the political career of the student who would become America's first black president. In the midst of that polarised racial environment, Barack Obama, then a member of the law school's black students' association and president of its Law Review, made it clear that while he supported Mr Bell, his natural inclinations were towards compromise and conciliation. A video of a young Mr Obama delivering a speech to protesters, released early this year by the late Andrew Breitbart in the vain hope it would hurt Mr Obama's presidential campaign, shows him smoothing Mr Bell's ego and drawing laughs from the crowd with comically exaggerated flattery. At the same time, as Gary Kamiya noted in Salon when the video was released, Mr Obama "tried to find a middle ground in the bitter dispute." Mr Kamiya quotes from Thomas Sugrue's 2010 book, "Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race":

Obama positioned himself as someone who could reconcile Harvard’s bitter differences by bringing a tone of civility to the debate. He refused to denounce his critics and hurl polemics. In the words of Bradford Berenson, a conservative student who would later work in the second Bush administration, “Even though he was clearly a liberal, he didn’t appear to the conservatives in the review to be taking sides in the tribal warfare.” Obama’s position in the middle allowed him to build a winning coalition of liberal and conservatives in his bid to be elected president of the Harvard Law review in February 1990. Later that year, in a dispute about the law review’s affirmative action policy, Obama again attempted to reconcile the opposing camps. He defended the principle of affirmative action while suggesting that he respected the “depth and sincerity” of its opponents beliefs.

The inclination to bridge ideological and partisan gaps became the defining trait of Mr Obama's character and of his political career. David Remnick, in his biography "The Bridge", wrote that during Mr Obama's time in the Senate, "conciliation was his default mode, the dominant strain of his political personality." In his 2008 speech on race, in his televised meetings with Republicans during the Obamacare negotiations, and in his meetings with Wall Street titans, Mr Obama has displayed the same pattern Mr Berenson recognised: first, he voices the concerns of the opposition in order to make it clear he understands and to some extent shares them. Then he puts forward a proposal he views as an acceptable compromise. Indeed, Mr Kamiya argues, the conciliatory impulse is Mr Obama's Achilles heel, the trait that at one point threatened to make a half-baked disaster of his presidency.

Obama has shown time and again that he will not get tough until he absolutely has to—and sometimes not even then. He’s conflict-averse. He prefers making beautiful speeches to taking on enemies, or committing himself to one position. He seems to always be slipping away from the fight, thinking he can have it both ways. It is a trait that got him elected, but it is his greatest weakness.

As of yesterday, Barack Obama, the great mediator, appears to have left the building. The proposal his administration has offered Republicans to avoid the fiscal cliff is a frankly Democratic proposal, reflecting Democratic priorities and economic beliefs. Mr Obama offers to achieve the necessary deficit reduction by raising $1.6 trillion in taxes over ten years, almost entirely from the rich, and by cutting up to $400 billion from the Medicare budget, if Republicans can come up with a proposal to do so. At the same time, the proposal extends the suspension of payroll taxes and long-term unemployment insurance, both measures targeted to aid the poor and middle class, and designed to minimise the contractionary hit the still-fragile US economic recovery will take next year if current law is not changed. This is progressive taxation and spending policy designed to reduce income inequality and protect the social safety net, reflecting a Keynesian belief in counter-cyclical economic policy focused on protecting demand by sparing the taxpayers most likely to spend rather than save. It's precisely what one might expect from a Democratic administration.

Whether Republicans will be able to put forward their own priorities and ultimately come to a compromise proposal depends on the GOP leadership, and on whether it now has enough control over its fractious, ideologically extremist tea-party backbenchers to be able to negotiate. The initial rhetoric coming from Mitch McConnell and John Boehner is not promising. But given the automatic tax hikes and spending cuts the Republicans will face if they fail to reach a compromise, and the fact that Mr Obama's proposals to hike taxes on the rich back to Clinton-era levels are overwhelmingly popular, it is difficult to imagine they will be able to avoid negotiating. And we've seen Republicans characterise Mr Obama's proposals as unacceptably left-wing before. In fact, that's what we've seen every time Mr Obama has come out with a proposal, regardless of how conciliatory those proposals were. When Mr Obama offered a health-care reform plan based on Republican proposals from the 1990s, when he offered to close the deficit with formulas including two dollars in spending cuts for every dollar of taxes raised, when he offered financial reform legislation that declined to break up large banks or ring-fence risky trading activities, Mr Obama encountered a blanket wall of Republican opposition and rhetoric painting him as the most radically left-wing president in history.

The old saw, which Robert Frost started retailing heavily in his late-life publicity blitz around JFK's inauguration, goes that "a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." (Apparently the first available citation is actually from William Earnest Hocking, a Harvard philosophy professor, in 1942.) Mr Obama may at one point have had a vision of his presidency as standing above the partisan fray in Congress, brokering compromise. This seems not to be a time in which such a presidency is possible. The partisan incentives in current American politics prevent Republicans from giving Mr Obama any credit when he attempts to be pre-emptively conciliatory, and Mr Obama appears to have decided that in the fiscal-cliff negotiations at least, he's better off negotiating as an interested party, rather than as a mediator.

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