Not compromising an inch – still complaining
You gotta love the liberals. They pass what they want by hook or crook and they still complain it is not enough.
Within minutes of passing Obama care, the biggest grab of power and wealth by any government ever – liberal congressmen and activists complained that it is not enough.
What can you learn from this?
Well I guess sarcastically, you can assume that you can’t please Democrats so don’t even try. I mean if they aren’t going to be satisfied with this, we might as well repeal it (if Republicans are not happy with it, and the Democrats are still complaining – logically you maximize everyone’s happiness with repeal).
But from a tactical standpoint it points out a very important point – you will stop getting when you stop asking.
In any negotiations, if you get everything you asked for, you have not asked for all you could have gotten. If sales, if you have no resistance to your price, then you are priced too low for the market. In politics, if you are not complaining, then you are the group that must compromise.
In a nation of whiners – the biggest whiner gets the goodies.
#1 – Never declare victory. To do so prematurely tells your troops they can relax – and that can be deadly on the battlefield. Look at Bush with his “Mission Accomplished” press conference in 2003. He created the expectation that everything was over and normalcy could begin again. When the troops didn’t come home and homeland security kept asking for more surveillance capabilities there was a real opening for dissent.
#2 – Always have “one more thing” that you need to make you happy. Sure you are not going to get it, nor are you going to insist on it, but it closes the negotiations. If they want to come back and change the deal, you can always raise your “one more thing” demand and they might just back down.
#3 – Don’t feed the ducks. Don’t think you can just give something to your adversary, kids, and political opponents once and that will be the end of it. You are probably wrong. If you feed the ducks once, the ducks stays at that location until both of you drown in their poop.
Tactics -- it's how you implement strategy. You use tactics all the time and they are being used against YOU too. You want to get out of the store quickly, so you make tactical judgments which line to get in, or to ask the manager to open another lane. Or it is bigger, like how you fire someone, or force them to quit. Some tactics you find ethical, others you may think are sleazy -- I'm not asking you to use a tactic, but being ignorant of a tactic doesn't make you virtuous; it just makes you a victim.