A golden opportunity was brought to us because of the tea party. They were elected on a mandate, a mandate to change the status quo, a mandate to try to rein in the deficit. They leveraged their mandate to where the leader of the house and Obama could have a golden opportunity to have a real substantive debt reduction. As they were hammering out the deal, boehner took hard hits from the tea party by producing 400 billion in revenues, the tea party was livid, but boehner delivered. But when Obama saw that the gang of six had been talking about possibly even more revenues, at least in their discussions, and Obama was hearing that he could be receiving lash back from his leftist extremist wing, he backed out of the deal and moved the goal posts.
Effectively killing the deal.
And as a result, we lost our AAA rating.
That's not a vapid taking point, or my translation of what happened, but of what the detailed WAPO piece and Woodward excerpts said.