agendaen the inside game and you talked about the president s focus on this kind of behind-the-scenes effort to get his agenda across the finish line. does it seem like that approach is working? is this why they re starting to make some progress? it definitely could be. the white house has been really aggressively working on members of congress on this. they ve been dialing members. white house staff have been chatting with members. there were groups of democrats who went to the white house this past week, and so they re really trying to hear everyone out and figure out what needs to be cut and can stay in order to make all these constituencies happy enough to get to some kind of deal. it s certainly a tricky balancing act for them, trying to make sure that you can make progressives who want all of these priorities to make it and moderates on the other hand who don t want to spend too much to get everyone on the same page. so let s shift gears a bit. the other big story on capitol