No Question, Really

On the House side, former Congressional Black Caucus chairman Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland was growing weary. He lamented

It would concern me greatly if these folks — the tea party group — have been able to convince the president to go along with a deal that basically gives them everything they want but yet still takes away from those who are our most vulnerable.

This is barely coherent- undermining the most vulnerable is not collateral damage to "the tea party group"; it is a prime objective. And "these folks" are not convincing the President to "go along" with this slap to the poor and the elderly. The Senate's Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, offered a deal without those reductions but Obama just couldn't find it within him to accept it.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, met with White House budget director Jacob J. Lew, prompting The Washington Post to report

For the first time in weeks of debt negotiations that have focused on rifts within the Republican Party, Thursday brought forward long-simmering tensions between Obama and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill.

With more concerns than details, Democrats lashed out, saying that deep cuts to federal agency budgets and entitlements were too steep a price to pay. They questioned whether Obama shared their core values, and they sought reassurance — at a hastily arranged evening meeting at the White House that lasted nearly two hours — that the final legislative package would be the balanced approach that the president had promised.

This in turn moved Firedoglake's Blue Texan to note wryly

Let’s pause for a second. Democratic legislators are publicly questioning the President’s core values. That seems like a rather bad development.

Good point, although there is really no longer much question about President Obama's core values. These were clarified by Frank Rich as he described the President's acquiescense to Wall Street and observed

For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.

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