So the President is making us all crazy again by negotiating with himself. I suspect this Politico assessment is pretty close to the truth —

Anxiety, not ideology prodded Obama to push for entitlement savings, people close to the president say. Obama has told people in his orbit that he feels “squeezed” by the rise of entitlement spending and sees it as a threat to getting anything else done, especially his plans for increased education and infrastructure spending.

For the past two years, Obama has championed what he calls “a balanced approach” to debt and deficit reduction, demanding $700 billion in high-earner tax hikes from Republicans earlier this year as a prerequisite to budget cuts and reform of runaway Social Security and Medicare costs.

The time to pay up is now, Obama’s aides say, and the White House needed to offer something to bring Republicans back to the bargaining table. They insist that he’s opposed to deeply cutting entitlements and is willing to do only the bare minimum needed to get a deal done.

However, the offer is doomed to fail, because ultimately Republicans aren’t interested in anything but obstruction. Paul Krugman:

Since the beginning, the Obama administration has seemed eager to gain the approval of the grownups — the sensible people who will reward efforts to be Serious, and eventually turn on those nasty, intransigent Republicans as long as Obama and co. don’t cater too much to the hippies.This is the latest, biggest version of that strategy. Unfortunately, it will almost surely fail. Why? Because there are no grownups — only people who try to sound like grownups, but are actually every bit as childish as anyone else.

This quote attributed to an anonymous White House staffer is revealing —

“We’re not going to have the White House forever, folks. If he doesn’t do this, Paul Ryan is going to do it for us in a few years,” said a longtime Obama aide, referring to the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate who proposed a sweeping overhaul of Medicare that would replace some benefits with vouchers.

This tells us that the Mighty Right is a major bugaboo in the White House collective mind; they will never be defeated; only temporarily contained. Charles Pierce —

Now, we have a Democratic administration, empowered by a solid re-election, that is proposing to its most loyal supporters that they support at least a partial sellout of the Democratic party’s greatest legacy because, some day, a Republican president might do something much worse. (As though said imaginary Republican president won’t go ahead and do much worse anyway, and claim a national mandate for it while he’s at it, and eventually find a way to blame “a Democratic president” for having launched the process in the first place.) I literally never have heard this argument made in any political context. I certainly never have heard it from anyone in an incumbent administration. If this is your rationale for making policy, what in the name of god is the point of running for office in the first place?

Yeah, that’s supposed to be how it works. Maybe the White House staffer believes democracy is already too far gone to be revived, though. In which case, perhaps the time for bargaining is over.