More Dinner Conversation With Republicans

     As we saw in the last post the early reviews seem to show it was a success-at least all the GOP Senators are speaking well of it and some are talking about "what we need' as reform of entitlements and tax reform-which is pretty consequential; perhaps there are enough GOP senators to get a bill passed over the head of Mitch McConnell.

     Now the President is eating still more dinner today, or at least lunch with Paul Ryan.

     "President Barack Obama --seeking to sell Republicans on a revival of "grand bargain" talks -- has invited 2012 GOP veep candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the chairman of the House Budget Committee, over to the White House for lunch on Thursday, POLITICO has learned."

      "Obama, who has always regarded Ryan as one of the leading intellectual forces of the opposition, has also invited the committee's ranking member Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). The idea for the chat-and-chew came during an extended phone conversation between Obama and Ryan earlier this week."

    

      "The meeting comes hours after the president supped with a handful of GOP senators at the Jefferson Hotel near the White House, a move that marked an abrupt shift from his post-election "outside" strategy" intended to pressure Republicans to accept new revenue increases as part of any new budget deal through a series of campaign-style events.:

     "By speaking directly with Ryan, Obama is hoping to enlist a powerful ally in convincing leadership to abandon its insistence on subjecting all future measures on the debt, deficit, taxes and entitlement reform to "regular order," the tortuous committee process dominated by party conservatives, according to a person close to the process."

      http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/03/obama-invites-paul-ryan-to-lunch-158708.html?hp=f1

       I know there's some worry about Obama giving away too much, but I guess I trust him more than a lot of liberals do. At least I'll wait to see what he's able to do before pushing the panic button. Don't get me wrong, I'm no more a fan of chained CPI or raising the Medicare age than the next liberal, however, tax reform and getting rid of the sequester are also very important priorities. I still would prefer to raise the cap-though I know there are concerns this could turn it into welfare. Look at it this way: SS has become a very regressive policy in the way that it's funded; the benefits are progressive but the funding is regressive. 

      It was considerably less regressive prior to the 1983 Greenspan summit. So can't we figure out a way to go in the opposite direction for once? While I get there are important concerns to address in getting rid of the  cap-perhaps we can simply raise it rather than end it-can you deny that it's better than chained CPI?

      One rather mundane benefit of eating all this dinner with Republicans is it seems that some are truly as clueless as Ezra Klein's famous GOP legislator who had no idea what Obama has even offered. Indeed, it seems that we've already had a moment like this thanks to last night's meeting:

     " TPM Reader SR is heartened but amazed if this could really have happened …

Steve Benen touched on a sentence from a First Read report on Obama’s dinner with Republican Senators: “[O]ne senator told us that he learned, for the first time, the actual cuts that the president has put on the table. Leadership hadn’t shared that list with them before.”

He called it “amazing” and then moved on. But if NBC News had been an actual news gathering organization one would have expected to follow it down three paths of inquiry: 1. Really? Or did you just skip the meeting?

2. Are Republican senators so deeply embedded in the right wing epistemologically closed feedback bubble that they don’t even read the frakking Washington Post? And, let us remember there have been multiple instances over the last several months of Republican politicians being stunned to find out that things they demand Obama put onto the table were put onto the table by him weeks or months earlier.

3. Assuming they didn’t just miss the meeting or zone out, why isn’t McConnell sharing actual information with his caucus? Why are the members of his caucus depending on him for their news?

And, now that I think about it …

4. Are the Beltway pundits insisting that both sides are being equally intransigent getting their facts from Mitch McConnell and Fox? Has the entire power structure of Washington truly become the caricature of elites so engrossed in an alternate reality of cocktail party chatter and platitudes that objective reality no longer matters?

     http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/03/that_deep_in_the_bubble.php?ref=fpblg

     Could it be that many of these rank and file Republicans don't know anything beyond what they here from  the leadership-and maybe Fox News? I have to agree with Steve Benen:

     "That, my friends, is amazing. Remember, there's been a fair amount of discussion over the last week, much of it instigated bythis item from Ezra Klein, that one of the reasons Republican lawmakers have rejected President Obama's overtures on a bipartisan fiscal deal is that Republican lawmakers simply don't know what President Obama has offered as part of a bipartisan fiscal deal."

       http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/03/07/17224185-charm-offensive-wins-positive-preliminary-reviews