To put it even more precisely, the Democrats agreed to agree with the Republicans. Make no mistake: the two parties did not meet halfway. One of them travelled all the way over to the other one’s house and knocked on the door. The Republicans barely made it down to the hall. From a Democratic or merely centrist point of view this is, as the New York Times puts it in an unusually unequivocal editorial, “a terrible deal”.
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It’s odd: Obama only gets worked up about means, not ends. He seems more interested in process, than the outcome of the process. His major interventions, like his televised speech on Monday night, contain pleas for the parties to come together, and schoolmasterly admonishments to Washington politicians. But his political mission is still as vague and unformed as it was in 2008. He is content to preach, rather than lead. The nadir of this approach was reached over the weekend, when he asked his followers to Tweet the word “compromise” to their Republican representatives. Is this what he meant, back then, by audacity? A plaintive plea for compromise with hardline conservatives?