Budget Games: Is Obama Playing Chess or Checkers?

According to Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser at the White House, President Obama has three rules for his staff: no drama; be disciplined; play chess not checkers. But if that’s the case, how can we explain the President’s new budget proposal, which has riled up his liberal base and gained him precious little credit from the Republicans? Is Obama breaking his own rules? Or does he have a fiendishly clever plan that his critics, on the left and the right, are too dim to discern?

When a Democratic President proposes to cut Social Security benefits, it surely counts as drama—especially when he does it up front, rather than at the end of a tortuous negotiation in which he has extracted some big concessions from the other side. No wonder the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Robert Reich, and the editors of the Nation are up in arms about what they see as a premature and self-defeating cave-in to the Republicans. “That’s exactly the problem,” Reich wrote other day. “The President throws things on the table before the Republicans have even sat down for dinner.”

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