Melissa Harris Perry Just Said: "It's Reasonable To Raise the Retirement Age"

[ProSense]

76. "Reid & Pelosi agreed to TRY to support Obama's taking Boehner's final deal."

From the WaPo article linked:

Working late into the evening, Obama asked someone to get Boehner on the phone. His message: I’ll take your last offer.

“Mr. President,” Boehner answered, “we don’t have time to reopen these negotiations.”

White House officials said this week that the offer is still on the table.

The following night, Obama delivered a prime-time address from the East Room to update Americans on the status of the talks. He left no doubt about whom he intended to blame for the failure of the grand bargain.

The only reason a deal is not on its way to becoming law, he said, “is because a significant number of Republicans in Congress are insisting on a different approach — a cuts-only approach — an approach that doesn’t ask the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to contribute anything at all.”

Wait, so it was Boehner's offer, not the President's?

These stories are speculative, anonymous bullshit. Here's another from the same period.

The Republican version of reality goes, briefly, like this: Boehner and Obama shook hands on a far-reaching deal to rewrite the tax code, roll back the cost of entitlements and slash deficits. But then Obama, reacting to pressure from Democrats in Congress, panicked at the last minute and suddenly demanded that Republicans accede to hundreds of billions of dollars in additional tax revenue. A frustrated Boehner no longer believed he could trust the president’s word, and he walked away. Obama moved the goal posts, is the Republican mantra.

<...>

On entitlements too they had moved closer to a final deal. The White House agreed to cut at least $250 billion from Medicare in the next 10 years and another $800 billion in the decade after that, in part by raising the eligibility age. The administration had endorsed another $110 billion or so in cuts to Medicaid and other health care programs, with $250 billion more in the second decade. And in a move certain to provoke rebellion in the Democratic ranks, Obama was willing to apply a new, less generous formula for calculating Social Security benefits, which would start in 2015. (The White House had rejected Boehner’s bid to raise the retirement age.) This wasn’t quite enough for Boehner, nor was it as extensive as what the Gang of Six had proposed. But the speaker’s team didn’t consider the differences to be insurmountable, assuming the two sides could also settle on a revenue number.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/obama-vs-boehner-who-killed-the-debt-deal.html

If the article is to be believed and taken at face value in its entirety, it appears the President rejected a proposal to raise the Social Security age.

I said in another thread, these discussions aren't so much about demanding the President protect Social Security as much as they are attempts to prove that he has no intention of doing so. That is why what he says will not matter to those pushing this angle. They'll simply parse his words and claim he still intends to cut the program. It will always be wait-and-see, just as it was during the President's first term.

Given that this would have ruined the President (Republicans would have had a field day), either Boehner is a fool or the President is shrewd.

Still, why not focus on what the President is saying now instead of harping on year-old anonymous reports?