Compromise: No, Mr. President, it’s not always the answer.

Earlier this year, Obama addressed a group of college students about his views on politics (video and quotes here). The key view: Compromise is the way, the truth and the light.
Quote: “One of the challenges of this generation is I think to understand that the nature of our democracy and the nature of our politics is to marry principle to a political process that means you don’t get 100% of what you want. You don’t get it if you’re in the majority, you don’t get it if you’re in the minority. You can be honorable in politics understanding you don’t always get what you want.”
Later in the presentation, he defensively asserts that if the Huffington Post had been around when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing only slaves in rebel states, it would have branded him a sellout.
Some thoughts:
•As the blogger Digby points out (no link, sorry), young, politically interested teens and adults are not the people who should adopt this view. A lot of progress in this country has come from activists working outside the political system applying pressure to those inside. AIDS activists. Civil rights groups. Suffragettes. Unionizers. Its their energy that pushes politicians to go beyond tentative compromise and make things change.
•Obama’s just plain wrong. The Civil Rights movement got 100 percent of what it wanted: An end to Jim Crow and legal guarantees of the right of minorities to work and live where they want. If they’d shot for less (one interviewee in the Eyes on the Prize series said they’d only pushed for a kinder, gentler Jim Crow at first, but became more extreme as whites refused to bend at all) it might not have happened.
Gay rights activists are going to get what they want (barring a theocratic takeover): Legalized marriage at the federal level, possibly within my lifetime. If they’d decided “well, we’ll never get beyond civil unions so let’s make that the most we ask for,” I’m not so sure.
Heck, Lincoln got what he wanted: The Union restored. As Obama points out, freeing the slaves was not his primary goal.
•Starting out with a compromise offer doesn’t pressure people on the other side to agree, it gives them a reason to push for more. That’s why you negotiate by asking for more than you’ll settle with.
Obama, as the article at the link notes (more here), seems to want to go straight to the compromise without negotiating. This is never a good tactic, and much less so when dealing with the current Republicans.
As noted here, Republicans don’t approach compromise as settling anything——they come back next year or next decade and try, try again. And they don’t compromise on core issues such as abortion or gay rights: Some current Republican state platforms call for recriminalizing homosexuality.
If you don’t think this works, just look at how abortions have become harder to obtain everywhere and impossible in some places. Antichoicers may not have recriminalized it yet, but they’ve done a damn fine job of putting it out of reach.
I admit that in politics it’s more complicated than sitting here blogging. On a lot of issues——cutting the deficit, raising taxes, Obamacare——the press would have crucified Obama if he’d moved much further to the left. And playing the sensible, nonpartisan pragmatist adult in the room may work for a lot of voters (at least if they don’t care about or notice the results).
But then again, FDR was far more confrontational, asserting in one speech that his enemies were “united in their hate for me——and I welcome their hatred” and proclaiming that in him they’d met their match.
FDR compromised when he had to but he fought when he had to. And he got a hell of a lot done. And won four elections.