I think the president displayed better brinksmanship than he has earlier, and played harder ball if not hardest possible ball with the opposition.
Any time we start out negotiations with John Boehner telling Harry Reid to go fuck himself, as was reported, you can be pretty sure there was some pressure being applied to the GOP.
That said, this was a result that involved two sides; we can only hold the president accountable for one of those two sides. Considering the intransigent unreasonable and unrealistic nature of the GOP, he had to come to a meeting of the minds with a side that is arguably demented and that hates his guts, intending to make this as difficult as possible out of sheer bloodymindedness, combined with a certain very real desperation on the part of the right.
I think the most interesting hard core negotiations are still ahead. I suspect that if we were privy to all of this, Obama played it pretty shrewdly, and that this is as close to what winning could be (at the risk of sounding like Charlie Sheen) as it is possible to achieve right now.
I'm glad that milk won't be reaching $8 a gallon, or that those on unemployment who would be the most hard hit are not being thrown to the wolves, so to speak.
If we take the long view, I think this places the GOP in a bad place for further factionalism and self-destruction, as well as a good place for the Dems for 2014 and 2016.
Is it perfect? Far from it. Can we live with it? For now. Taking the long view, it's better positioning than where the left and center have been before now.
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