House Speaker Boehner, whom Mr Obama singled out in his speech for having "walked away" from a "grand bargain" during the debt-ceiling debate in July, said the president's approach was unhelpful.
He personally blew up a grand bargain with Speaker John Boehner in the debt-limit fracas after spurning his own deficit commission.
These are all relatively modest measures. (We centrists always try to balance idealism with realism.) Unfortunately, the larger opportunities for broad tax reform or a grand bargain on long-term deficits and debt are unlikely to come until after the election -- and there's no rational reason to expect that the hyperpartisan politics will end then.
Republicans vowed to oppose new tax increases, which ruled out a "grand bargain" to reduce the deficit and national debt.
And that began with reaching out on the Recovery Act and on health care reform and on issue after issue, and continued through his efforts in negotiations with the Speaker of the House to try to find a balanced, sweeping grand bargain approach to dealing with our deficit and debt issues.
Therefore, we are pursuing, as well -- even as we pursue the bigger prize, we are working with Congress to ensure that there is a mechanism by which we simply raise the debt ceiling, or raise the debt ceiling and do something much smaller than the grand bargain.
Mr. Obama's outreach to congressional Republicans culminated this summer with a fight over raising the debt ceiling and a failed effort to reach a bipartisan "grand bargain" on reducing the federal deficit.
Had he taken them seriously before now, one can imagine the results: a faster economic recovery with lower unemployment, a popular form of health-care reform, a grand bargain with real spending cuts, a smaller deficit and declining debt-to-GDP ratio, and a less polarized Washington.
"So we ought to be able to, in the next three months, finish out that grand bargain to get us to the point of ... where debt to GDP (gross domestic product) is about 3%, " he said.
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Instead of a grand bargain, in late July the White House and Republicans agreed to raise the debt ceiling enough for about eighteen more months of government borrowing, and they created yet another bipartisan group to address the long-term fiscal issues.
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