Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland: Dems should ‘fold up’ if we lose tax cuts debate

"I saw what CNN said after that meeting yesterday. A line saying the president said he should have been willing to work with the GOP earlier. What? After all of this you don't realize these people want to destroy you and your agenda?" he asked. "How many times do you have to be, you know, slapped in the face? Look what they did with health care.

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I understand Strickland's frustration, but he's wrong in a crucial sense. If you judge by public opinion, then Dems were winning the argument over the Bush tax cuts, and were in fact successfully selling the idea that the high end rates should expire.

Here, for instance, is a new Gallup poll out today finding that 44 percent want to let the tax cuts expire for various categories of wealthy Americans, while only 40 percent want to keep all the tax cuts. A Marist-McClatchy poll earlier this week found that 51 percent favor extending only the tax cuts for those under $250,000 (the position of most Dems), while 45 percent favor extending them all (the GOP position).

Meanwhile, a recent NBC/WSJ poll found that the Dem position of extending only the middle class tax cuts has far more support than any other option on the table right now.

At risk of overgeneralizing, the problem isn't that Dems aren't capable of winning an argument. It's that they don't think they're capable of winning a protracted political standoff, even on an issue where the public is on their side, once Republicans start going on the attack. They seem to set their goal early on at salvaging a compromise, rather than going for the win. As a result, they tend to telegraph weakness at the outset, sending a clear message that they'll essentially give Republicans what they want as long as they can figure out a way to call it a compromise.