Obama's Real Problem

In the wake of the federal shutdown debacle, the GOP is widely despised and in internally divided. Yet the Obama administration continues to pursue a "Grand Bargain" with the congressional GOP in which it will trade cuts in Social Security for some kind of tax increase. The big lie here is that Social Security benefits are not the cause of the Federal deficit. It's the Bush tax cuts which are the root cause of the deficit, which in real terms is actually decreasing anyway. It seems that Obama is obsessed with going down in history as "The Great Conciliator" that he is going to throw away his last chance to make the historic change he promised. It seems that the Democrats will do in 2014 what they did in 2010: rescue defeat from the jaws of victory.