It was Obama, not Boehner who first flinched

[Magox]

Remember last years debt debacle? And how Obama and company said it was due to the intransigence of conservatives that a deal couldn't get done.

 

WashingtonPost has a new story, which I give them kudos for, for actually doing what journalists should do, even when that means they have to write a piece that doesn't support the president.

 

“I want a deal,” he said.

 

The aides put down their muffins and BlackBerrys and snapped to attention.

 

Secrecy would be essential as the details came together, the president told everyone. He spoke openly with Boehner about how the two sides might sell the emerging plan to their respective parties, an imposing task from either end.

 

“How soon can we get this drafted?” the president asked, according to notes taken during the meeting by a top Republican staff member. When Obama left, the negotiations rushed forward, staffers on both sides now energized by the prospect of a deal.

 

Three days later, the grand bargain was cold and dead.

 

What happened? Obama and his advisers have cast the collapse of the talks as a Republican failure. Boehner, unable to deliver, stepped away from the deal, simple as that.

 

But interviews with most of the central players in those talks — some of whom were granted anonymity to speak about the secret negotiations — as well as a review of meeting notes, e-mails and the negotiating proposals that changed hands, offer a more complicated picture of the collapse. Obama, nervous about how to defend the emerging agreement to his own Democratic base, upped the ante in a way that made it more difficult for Boehner — already facing long odds — to sell it to his party. Eventually, the president tried to put the original framework back in play, but by then it was too late. The moment of making history had passed.

 

The actions of Obama and his staff during that period in the summer reflect the grand ambitions and the shortcomings of the president’s first term.

 

A president who promised to bring the country together, who confidently presented himself as the transformational figure able to make that happen, now had his chance. But, like earlier policy battles, the debt ceiling negotiations revealed a divided figure, a man who remained aloof from a Congress where he once served and that he now needed. He was caught between his own aspirations for historical significance and his inherent political caution. And he was unable to bridge a political divide that had only grown wider since he took office with a promise to change the ways of Washington, underscoring the gulf between the way he campaigned and the way he had governed.

 

In the end, that brief effort, described by White House officials as the most intense and consequential of Obama’s presidency, not only illuminated pitfalls in the road he had taken during the previous three years but also directed him down a different, harder-edged, more overtly partisan path that is now defining his reelection campaign.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-evolution-behind-the-failed-grand-bargain-on-the-debt/2012/03/15/gIQAHyyfJS_story_1.html

 

I highly suggest for people to read it.

 

 

 

Politico has a recap of it

 

The verdict is in: Team Boehner has taken Round One of the great journalistic reconstruction of last year’s failed debt talks.

 

Eight months after deficit talks collapsed between the nation’s top two elected officials, a 4,600-word inside-the-room narrative by The Washington Post on Sunday — the first of several sweeping accounts in the works — paints the Obama administration as walking away from a nearly-done agreement with Boehner. And when the president eventually came around and wanted to cut a deal, Boehner said it was too late.

 

In short, the Post piece bolsters the Boehner team’s narrative that it was Obama who got cold feet and became unwilling to strike a grand bargain to fix the nation’s finances.

 

“The story makes it clear that the facts are as we’ve always described them,” said Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman, in a Sunday interview. “The speaker showed a great deal of courage by putting $800 billion in revenues through tax reform on the table, and the White House couldn’t close the deal. They moved the goal posts and refused to get serious.”

 

The White House declined to talk about the story on the record.

 

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74163.html#ixzz1pWkFfLK9

 

The negotiations with House Republicans were Obama’s clearest opportunity to realize his 2008 campaign pledge to usher in a more productive, bipartisan era in Washington — a promise that critical independent voters are bound to remember in November. The president has since pivoted to make a more concerted appeal to the Democratic base, blasting what he calls intransigent Republicans at every opportunity.

 

But in the Post’s version of events, Obama is portrayed as getting spooked by a backlash from the left if he pulled the trigger. And former Obama chief of staff Bill Daley provided surprising, on-the-record support of the GOP’s insistence that the president deserves blame for losing his will.

 

The view from Capitol Hill — from allies and foes of the speaker alike — is that the story is a victory for Boehner. Although his team didn’t pitch the piece, it showed him as something of a martyr — a man willing to put his speakership in jeopardy for the good of the country

 

In other words, what Obama wasn't willing to do.

Edited March 19, 2012 by Magox

[B-Man]

Please closely read Sunday’s Washington Post front-page article on the breakdown of negotiations between Obama and Boehner/Cantor before the debt ceiling votes. It reveals three things:

 

1. Obama intentionally lied to the nation at his prime time address when he said the Republicans insisted on a “cuts only approach” when he knew full well Boehner and Cantor had already accepted over $800B in tax increases.

 

2. Obama is a TERRIBLE negotiator. He combines great arrogance with great timidity and ignorance. A truly awful combination in an executive.

 

3. Reid and Pelosi are merely “useful idiots” for Obama and they had no influence in one of the most critical domestic issues to come up during the Big O’s presidency.

 

 

 

 

To see this actually reported by the Post is stunning.

[IDBillzFan]

If the Post is writing something like this, it may be time for the WH to bring in the editorial team for a quick talking-to.

 

Will be interesting to see if this gets any legs, but I suspect it will die with all the other stories that support the Obama-is-in-over-his-head narrative.

[B-Man]

If the Post is writing something like this, it may be time for the WH to bring in the editorial team for a quick talking-to.

 

Will be interesting to see if this gets any legs, but I suspect it will die with all the other stories that support the Obama-is-in-over-his-head narrative.

 

 

it would be true, but

 

 

Since the federal government is adding to the national debt at a rate of $132 billion a month, the debt ceiling is on schedule to be reached by October 15, 2012.

 

So the same battle looms in the fall.................now will Mr. Obama try the same "Republicans want to shut down the Government" schtick ??

 

We can now point to his poor leadership in the past negotiations, so his "Savior of the people" silliness has already been exposed.

 

.

Edited March 19, 2012 by B-Man

[B-Man]

Another article on this media myth on the budget negotiations,

 

The Fiscal Times

 

Obama Loses Credibility over Debt Deal

By LIZ PEEK, Posted: March 19, 2012

 

Is it acceptable for the President of the United States to lie to the American people? In cases where the truth would undermine national security, absolutely. In cases where the truth undermines the president’s approval ratings, not so much.

 

Over the weekend, the Washington Post published a carefully reconstructed account of the failed debt ceiling negotiations that occurred last summer between House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama. In the aftermath of the breakdown in the talks, Mr. Obama was quick to blame “irresponsible” House Republicans for his inability to conclude a “grand bargain” to rein in future budget deficits. He maintained that his was the middle course, that he was open to a balance of spending cuts and revenue increases but that the GOP refused to allow any tax hikes.

 

The narrative stuck. The worried country was irate at the inflexibility of Republican leaders. On August 5, when Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit rating on U.S. debt for the first time in U.S. history, Americans knew just whom to blame.

 

Only it turns out, according to the version released by the Post, the president wasn’t telling the truth. John Boehner was right when he said that the president was the one who had stepped away from the budget talks, fearful of the political fallout that might attach to bold measures to tackle our nation’s deficit. Because the“Gang of Six” senators inserted into the talks an agreement at the last minute that called for bigger spending cuts and greater increases to taxes than those under discussion in the White House, the president became alarmed that his bargain would not seem so grand after all. If Gang of Six conservative senators like Tom Coburn and Saxby Chambliss could accept tax hikes of $2 trillion, how could he press for only $800 billion?

 

Panicked that he was losing the high ground, the president ditched a nearly-concluded agreement with Boehner that called for raising taxes while also cutting sacred cows like Medicaid and Medicare and raising the age for receiving Social Security benefits. He scuttled that deal by suddenly demanding 50% more in tax hikes; then, when the GOP blanched, Obama pivoted again to the “hand shake” deal almost concluded. Finally, Republicans had had enough. In the end, Mr. Obama chose political comfort instead of manning up to a risky but essential effort to change our fiscal trajectory.

 

This is no small lie. At the beginning of this year, President Obama laid out his reelection themes. He accuses Republicans for choosing to protect the wealthy from higher taxes at the cost of the nation’s fiscal health and blames a “do-nothing” Congress for refusing to pass more job-creating legislation. It may not seem like a particularly impressive message – most people think the presidency is a powerful post – but it suits Mr. Obama to blame his predecessor George W. Bush for the deep recession that took hold in 2007 and to blame Republicans in Congress for our abnormally slow recovery. (It should be noted that Mr. Obama also occasionally throws Democrats in Congress under the bus too; he is an equal-opportunity blamer.)

 

If the story is not true – if it was Mr. Obama who caved into political pressure and not Mr. Boehner – much of his message over the past several months becomes not only false but massively distasteful. It would certainly explain why the GOP leadership has been unwilling to meet the president half-way; no one likes to be the fall-guy. The president vented his frustration over the breakdown of talks by attacking the GOP, and by personally going after Mr. Boehner. He accused the House Speaker for not returning his phone calls, complained that it was the GOP leader that walked away from the talks, and whined that “I’ve been left at the alter a couple of times now.”

 

In his East Room address in July concerning the debt ceiling negotiations, Mr. Obama blamed “a significant number of Republicans in Congress (who) are insisting on a cuts-only approach.” As we now know, this was not the reason the negotiations failed. While some Republicans may have wanted such an agreement, their leadership was prepared to agree to some $800 billion in higher taxes. In any event, it wasn’t the cuts-only crowd that balked; it was the president. Railing at the GOP wasn’t a smart move; petulance does not become the Commander in Chief. In the end, both Mr. Obama and Congress suffered a decline in approval ratings.

 

As Americans learn the truth of this failed effort, they may start to question other aspects of the White House narrative. They may wonder whether the president blocked the Keystone XL pipeline out of safety concerns or to appease environmentalists whose support he needs, or whether Obamacare will in fact slow the rise in healthcare costs. They may even begin to question whether millionaires and billionaires actually pay less in taxes than their secretaries.

 

Losing credibility is a terrible thing; on the other hand, Mr. Obama’s loss may be the country’s gain.