How would Barack Obama deal with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? The first clue was in how he dealt with Hillary Clinton.
No, I’m not equating Hillary with Holocaust-denying thugs but this is Obama’s first high profile negotiation with a tough adversary. How’d he do?
At first blush, Obama’s team made a number of poor negotiating moves. In Florida, the Clinton forces asked for a full seating of the delegation based on the popular vote of the unsanctioned primary. One of the cardinal rules of negotiating is to remember that at the end of the day there will be an overpowering urge to split the difference. If you want to end up at a 5, and your adversary has opened with a 10, you’d better start with 1.

By that logic, when Hillary asked for it all, Obama should have demanded that none of the delegation be seated. Instead, he suggested that they seat the full delegation with half voting rights. This is called “negotiating with yourself,” though President Bush might call it “appeasement.”
By the normal intro-to-negotiation rules, Obama made another serious error in Michigan. Obama’s campaign viewed the entire Michigan primary as illegitimate because he wasn’t on the ballot. Obama’s forces proposed a 50-50 split, in effect saying, the popular vote was irrelevant so we might as well go halvsies, almost as if the primary had never happened. Obama apparently had the votes to win on the 50-50 proposal but never forced it. Was he afraid to use his power? Bill Kristol might ask. Instead, he capitulated to a compromise (Hillary 69, Obama 59) that Hillary’s people then used to prove that the delegate count did relate to the popular vote and that she was robbed of 4 delegates.
Negotiationg with yourself. Appeasement. Fear of using power. Obama seemed to have made a number of mistakes that would make him easy pickings for a ruthless dictator.
On the other hand….
Obama won.
He maneuvered the rules meetings in a way that guaranteed his winning the nomination. Look at how he did, and you see a different picture about his negotiating skills.
First, ironically, he did not engage in direct negotiations with Hillary Clinton. Everything was done through surrogates. When he saw an opportunity for a credible third party to take ownership of the outcome in a way that helped him, he did. So even though the 69-59 split in Michigan was problematic for him, the fact that it was proposed by the Michigan Democratic Party – including its Hillary-supporting governor – helped tremendously. According to press accounts, the 69-59 difference was arrived at when the party officials split the difference between Obama’s 64-64 proposal and Hillary’s 73-47. Obama got a split-the-difference result, but with the imprimatur of the Michigan state party.
As for Florida, you’re never supposed to start with your “outcome” position – unless you know the other side is going to accept it. It turns out that the committee DID accept that proposal – unanimously – and the Obama forces undoubtedly knew they would. This enabled them to look far more reasonable and still get what they wanted.
In short, he quickly abandoned particular principles – these primaries didn’t count, we shouldn’t change the rules in the middle of the game – as part of small, pragmatic compromises that got him the bigger prize He used the assets he had, in a quiet, deft way, and ended up getting almost everything he wanted.