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A fascinating and in-depth article detailing just how close we came to a "Grand Bargain".

When Boehner finally called back late that Friday afternoon, it was a perfunctory call between wounded suitors. Each man hung up and immediately went out to tell his side of the story, offering the versions — Obama moved the goal posts, Boehner couldn’t deliver — that would soon become fixtures of Washington’s double-sided reality. Both were essentially true, and yet incomplete.

Why didn’t Boehner call back earlier on Friday? Any kid who has ever traded a Pokémon card knows that you don’t walk away from a negotiation without at least leaving your best offer on the table. Boehner would say that he had run out of time and was certain Obama wouldn’t budge. But there’s a more persuasive theory, which is that Boehner didn’t want to talk with Obama because he feared exactly the opposite — that Obama would respond by offering him the original terms from the previous Sunday, and that Boehner would then find himself trapped. He had to now know that, despite his sense of himself as a persuasive statesman who could get his caucus to follow his lead, he couldn’t get any deal past even his own leadership. It was safer for Boehner to walk away and accuse Obama of having sabotaged the deal than to risk that Obama would retreat to the earlier terms on which they had agreed, forcing the speaker to backtrack himself.

In the end, that’s essentially what happened, anyway. The following day, Congressional leaders informed Obama that they were ready to offer a deal on their own. It would force another vote on the debt ceiling in 2012, and it would create a “supercommittee” of six lawmakers charged with finding massive spending reductions; if the committee failed, a slate of painful cuts would go into effect at the end of 2012. (Ultimately, the debt ceiling vote was pushed back to 2013, but the rest of the bill passed.) Obama hated it and made his anger known to the lawmakers who laid it out for him in the Oval Office. After that meeting, he called Boehner yet again, asking if they could just go back to the previous Sunday’s handshake agreement. Boehner told him it was time to move on.

Boehner Betrayed?

From Boehner’s perspective, it’s not hard to see why he came away feeling Obama betrayed him. “He had to have known that this was going to set my hair on fire,” Boehner told me when we sat together in his office on the first day of March. He was seated in a leather chair by a marble fireplace, his cigarette smoldering in an ashtray at his side. Three aides sat nearby.

“You have to understand,” he went on, “there were hours and hours of conversation, and he would tell me more about my political situation than I ever would think about it, all right? So when you come in and all of a sudden you want $400 billion more — he had to have known!” Boehner shook his head, as if he was still puzzled by it all.

“Well, he did know,” the speaker finally decided. “He had to have known that he was driving this thing off a cliff.”

And yet, in the end, while both leaders had profound reservations about a grand bargain that would threaten their parties’ priorities, what’s undeniable, despite all the furious efforts to peddle a different story, is that Obama managed to persuade his closest allies to sign off on what he wanted them to do, and Boehner didn’t, or couldn’t. While Democratic leaders were willing to swallow either a deal with more revenue or a deal with less, Boehner’s theoretical counteroffer, which probably reflected what he would have done if empowered to act alone, never even got a hearing from his leadership team.

Shortly before this article was published, Boehner issued a statement to me saying there was “zero chance” of them actually making a counteroffer late that week. But when I asked Boehner on the first day of March whether he had floated his counteroffer past Republican leaders other than Cantor, his reply was more ambiguous.

“I don’t know that it ever got that far,” Boehner said after a pause. “Eric and I were comfortable with where we were. Did we think we were out on a limb? Yes. Did we think the president, if we came to an agreement, was going to be out on a limb? Yes. But I don’t think us sitting in this room with the rest of the leaders, discussing exactly where we were . . . I’m not going to say it didn’t happen. But the reason I feel that way is because I had a pretty good feel for what I thought the reaction was.” Later, he told me flatly, “I look at what happened last summer as the biggest disappointment I’ve had as speaker.”

Obama vs. Boehner - Who Killed the Debt Deal?

Discuss if you will.

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