David Corn on Obama's Grand Bargain in Retrospect

     I was just browsing Corn's "Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Fought Back Against Boehner. Cantor, and the Tea Party."

     In it we learn what Laurence O'Donnell has said at the time-and I had tended to believe-but that many liberal Obama haters refused to accept-that Obama actually played a masterful hand of poker. Only now is it really clear that he did win that faceoff entirely.

     I mean right away he won even in the coming weeks as while the whole miserable process hurt his popularity some it hurt the Republicans a lot more-at that point it was already clear the GOP lost. Before that they had a good deal of political sentiment behind their backs.

    The most recent attempts by Boehner to threaten more blackmail in the next round of debt ceiling that fell entirely stillborn to the ground show what Obama has reaped.

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2012/05/boehner-debt-ceiling-chicken-20.html

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2012/05/debt-ceiling-chicken-20-fight-democrats.html

     In the book Corn shows us that Obama actually had a secret plan that he let very few in on where he had to seem serious about deficit plan. It certainly convinced the firebaggers. In the end though the fact is thanks to Obama we haven't had the massive austerity they had in the UK and EU and so we're in considerably better shape.

    An interesting detail Corn reveals is that initially Obama had gotten Boehner's agreement to the Grand Bargain as well as Harry Reid. He got Nancy Pelosi's though she was very concerned about anything that could hurt Medicare. Mitch McConnell actually had said he'd go along with it but that he didn't think it would pass the muster with Congressional Republicans which turned out to be exactly right.

   What killed it was Cantor and John Kyle. So the top Republicans in both the House and the Senate had supported it but their number two men-Cantor and Kyle had pulled the carpet from under them. There's little question that if Boehner had pushed it in public he would have not only lost the vote in Congress but that he likely would have lost his Speakership.

   Boehner during the entire negotiations wore two hats. In private he would meet with the President and try to hammer out a deal and agreed to tax hikes. In public he would attack the President for wanting to raise taxes in a recession,,