middle income americans. they re concentrated on trying to bring continued tax relief to the wealthy. reporter: good morning, it s 8:00 on the east coast. as you take a live look at new york city. welcome to morning joe. back with us on set, mike barnicle and john heilemann and steve rattner, along with pat buchanan in washington. a lot going on right now. you know, friday, saturday, there was the talk of the grand bargain, $4 trillion. boehner backed off, saying it was zoigoing to look more like trillion. what happened? boehner couldn t sell any kind of tax cuts to his caucus. boehner, i have to say i m sorry, tax increases. thank you. still early. i must say, a year ago, i m not sure i would have sat here and thought of boehner as a constructive force, but i think he s trying to bring this group together, and i think he s got an incredibly unruly group on
months, for punting on the budget. now president obama gets up and says, withtime going to put entitlements on the table, medicare, medicaid, social security social security, nancy pelosi and a lot of the democrats went crazy on friday, saying, we can t believe barack obama s doing this. he s willing to put a lot of political capital on the table. and willing to talk about everything. but if revenues being part of that, but also everything else. and what john boehner ended up doing, said he was willing to talk about it until eric cantor told him not to and john boehner ran away from it. that may be a good assessment of the political reality, but showing a lot less courage than the president shows. so that is one narrative that came out from the white house this weekend. i will tell you the narrative from capitol hill was that boehner started to back away when he saw that suddenly all of these entitlement cuts became nebulous. kind of like, remember the government shutdown that wa
been brought by eric cantor. cantor pulled out. boehner is more of a deal maker by nature. he s been in congress for a long time. what you are seeing is reflective of it. a tax increase is not possible because of where we are. the thought of losing the support is what they all fear daily. it s surprising but understand, on capitol hill, if you believe in the republican conference that you are outflanked on the right, it s cause for alarms to go off. look at orin hatch. the word said by a conservative media have a lot of effect on these guys. look what happened in 2010. they had to assure themselves and not be flanked on the right.
get together and carter is like give me this side of the oval office and i m fine. harry reid is like that. cantor doesn t act like he wants to be here. and people made fun of him. every tick tok has the beginning of this conversation starting at the gulf summit. it s when they started the secret meetings of them getting on board. if you spend time around john boehner, more than five minutes, you find out quickly, he is not an ideolog. i worked with him four terms. i never heard anybody knocking him. he s liked from the bob dole school or government. i never saw him get impassioned other an issue unless he felt he
hoping it does not hurt the middle class. bidens bipartisan plan is the most viable option. le s give the president credit here. he went there during entitlements and social security, medicare, medicaid. that s what the white house is saying. republicans are claiming he backed up. if he s getting to $4 trillion, he had to put those on the table. i think there s, obviously, the devil is in the details and how it worked. it s been up for negotiation. i don t think there s a dispute claiming the president did not put all that stuff on the table and speaker boehner thought he wanted to join him after the secret meetings. boehner wanted to go big, too. then he faced the reality of the