President Obama Weighs Harry Truman Strategy for 2012 Reelection Campaign - The Daily Beast: If McConnell concludes that, in an election year focused on the wealth gap, the GOP’s stance on taxes could backfire and cost Republicans their chance to control the Senate, or threaten their majority in the House, then Obama might have a negotiating partner. “The best way to reach a deal for Obama is to pull out the partisan cudgel and slam them between the eyes repeatedly,” says Ornstein. “They’ll only come to the table if their political brand is damaged. They’re not coming for the good of the country.”
Republicans want voters to believe that the supercommittee failed because Obama didn’t show leadership. No one in the White House will admit to a conscious decision to let the supercommittee combust on its own, but that was the practical result. Obama did inject a plan of his own into the deliberations with a 65-page roadmap that the White House released right after Labor Day. It incorporated elements of the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission, which Obama had created but then largely ignored.