Those efforts--some of which happened in secret--are, according to reporters Jay Newton-Small and Michael Scherer,

the story of two self-described dealmakers in a town where dealing is often a synonym for surrender, who ran up against the limits of their roles, their powers and their colleagues. Boehner and Obama have gotten credit for thinking big and working to overhaul outdated economic policies. But they waited too long to start, in part because they didn't take the time to get to know each other years ago. They also misjudged their armies: They rode out to rescue the country, only to watch many of their followers run for the hills.

They explain how the pair came up with the idea to use the debt ceiling as a lever for a budget deal in order to

freeze out their respective extremists and make the kind of historic deal that no one really thought possible anymore--bigger than when Reagan and Tip O'Neill overhauled the tax code in 1986 or when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich passed welfare reform a decade later.

You got it-- each side has its crazies that prevent great things from happening. Obama tried to freeze the left-wing extremists, and Boehner has.... well...I guess the upshot, according to Time, is unfortunately all the extremists balked; the left wouldn't cut Social Security benefits, the right wouldn't make wealthy people pay any more in taxes:

The Republican refusal to consider any new revenues, including making easy fixes to the tax code to close loopholes for businesses and other groups that don't need public subsidies, is as recklessly absolutist as Democrats' insistence that bloated entitlement programs are untouchable.

Protecting Social Security benefits (average monthly check: $1,177) is just the same as protecting corporations from paying higher taxes. That makes sense only in The Sensible Center that the Beltway media have concocted.

Given the the public consistently tells pollsters that job creation should be the country's top priority--often picked over deficit reduction by wide margins--this information should be included in every article on the budget debate. Thus when the New York Times (4/8/11) says that the Obama administration has agreed to $34.5 billion in cuts, and House Speaker John Boehner is pushing for $39 billion, the paper should note that the administration's position would cost approximately 345,000 jobs, while Boehner's would reduce employment by about 390,000.

I suspect that the inclusion of this information would rapidly change the debate.

Obama Proposes Cuts to Trim Deficit; GOP, Others Want More

The piece by Richard Wolf and Mimi Hall begins, "President Obama will send Congress a 2012 budget today that would trim the budget deficit by $1.1 trillion over the next decade, but Republicans and nonpartisan budget experts are already saying that's not enough." And that's how the story is framed: You've got the White House vs. the Republicans, and "nonpartisan budget experts" who agree with the Republicans.

"We're going to make tough choices," promises the White House budget director--who is countered by USA Today: "Those choices aren't as tough, however, as the ones made by Obama's bipartisan fiscal commission in December." Two sources--described a second time as "nonpartisan budget experts," in case we missed it the first time--concur: Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, accuses the White House of "a political unwillingness to tackle the tough issues," while Robert Bixby, director of the Concord Coalition, described as "a fiscal watchdog group," charges that "the entitlement and tax reform agenda will apparently be deferred yet again."

So everybody who's not a partisan or an amateur, apparently, believes that Obama's cuts don't go far enough? Of course that's not true; USA Today's "experts" actually occupy a narrow strip of ideological terrain, with both the groups they represent receiving funding from billionaire deficit hawk Pete Peterson. The Concord Coalition is a Peterson creation; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in addition to its backing from Peterson, is part of the New America Foundation, whose "Leadership Council"--people who give them at least $25,000 a year and as a result "participate in the intellectual life of the Foundation in numerous ways"--has included executives from such companies as Wal-Mart, Goldman Sachs and a variety of other financial industry firms.

It's very clear that such entities have a definition of the kind of "tough" that would be desirable that is very different from the "tough" that would be advocated by equally nonpartisan experts at a group like the Economic Policy Institute, which is critical of the president's budget for being too quick to cut spending during an economic crisis.

But the only other sources in the story, besides the White House and the Peterson-affiliated deficit hawks, are House Speaker John Boehner--who says Obama's budget "will continue to destroy jobs by spending too much, borrowing too much and taxing too much"--and "150 economists" rounded up by Boehner who insist in an open letter that "to support real economic growth and support the creation of private-sector jobs, immediate action is needed to rein in federal spending." That one could find far more than 150 economists who would give you the standard economic line that cutting federal spending at a time of depressed demand is not a way to create jobs, private-sector or otherwise, is not even hinted at by USA Today.

 On entitlements, like Social Security, you said the retirement age should be raised, but you said you don't want to get into negotiating how that happens just now until the problem is better defined.  Again, when it comes to leadership, when it comes to the need to, you know, have no limit on cutting, don't you think Americans understand what the problem with Social Security is?  What will it take for you to join with the White House to make real reform to deal with this piece of the budget?

When interviewers like Gregory demand more "leadership" on a given issue, it's not hard to figure out what they mean.  A question like this implies that Social Security is a big, big problem in need of a big, big solution--and that raising the retirement age (which is, remember, a benefit cut) isn't enough to deal with the problem.

Just a few months ago (FAIR Blog, 11/15/10), Gregory's NBC program featured a discussion of the White House's right-leaning deficit commission involving right-wingers Alan Greenspan and Newt Gingrich, with right-wing Democrat Harold Ford in the mix too. Gregory's point then was much the same:

I don't see why, for instance, some of these suggestions, Harold, on Social Security are going to be demagogued to death. Why, in 50 years, people can't look at raising the retirement age and have that be a serious discussion point?

As we noted back in that November post, the retirement age is already rising, which amounts to a benefit cut for the poor, and raising the cap on taxable income--which would be a tax hike on the wealthy--would take care of all the supposed long-term problems with Social Security's finances. But something tells me that you're not likely to see David Gregory demanding that any political leaders declare their support for this simple fix.