Oh yee of little faith! ( and it takes a lot of faith to accept this "compromise" deal ). First, for those of you who don't know me, please look at my diaries and you will see that I detest Obama and I detested him when detesting Obama wasn't too cool. But on this latest compromise deal, I have to give him props. He did just fine and I am sure that in his mind he did really great.
First, does anyone have the misconception that Obama cares about progressives at all? Let's face it, he detests us and at heart is a Reagan conservative which puts him slightly right of center in the current political spectrum. He has always detested us except when he needed our votes and help in 2012. And let's be honest with ourselves, he didn't really pander to us - he kind of left it up to us as to who we would prefer in the White House, a slobering imbecile or a slightly right wing genius. ( ok, right wing genius could be an oxymoron but Obama is slightly right wing and he is a genius ).
So given that at best Obama doesn't care about Progressives and most likely would rather bite into a ball of aluminum foil than listen to us and deal with us, is anyone surprised that he reneged on his campaign promise to increase taxes on the portion of income over $250,000? He even offered the $400,000 level for increased taxes as part of "grand bargain" 4 weeks ago with no prompting from Republicans (of course Social Security cuts were also included) but Boehner walked away from it. Now we get the filet. The part he really wanted: Taxes are going up on the rich and Republicans are voting for it! This is prettly big and in Obama's mind it is huge. Remember the "we aren't red states and blue states, we are the United States" speech? This guy puts consensus above everything and that is way above Progressive concerns which are at the bottom of his priority list.
So he got what he wanted and certainly in his own mind has hit it out of the park. And I have to give him his due. He got the Republicans in the Senate to vote for a tax increase. That is no small acheivement. He acheived consensus on a very contentious issue and for him, that is the goal not the contents of the consensus.