President Obama's Dilemma

President Obama has a problem.
The problem is called the Democratic Party, which is his own party.
The Democrats are angry with him for making a deal with the Republicans to break the logjam over taxes and unemployment benefits. They are probably also more than a little angry with themselves for not using the congressional majority they possessed for two years to push through their own version of a tax program. They didn't do that, despite the President's lukewarm requests, and now both the Democratic Party and the President have seen their leftist positions bent toward the center by the newly powerful GOP.
How did it happen?
In the November congressional elections, called the mid-term elections, the President was called to task by voters all over the United States for adopting a health care program that few Americans want in the form in which it was passed by Congress. The Democratic Congress and President Obama used a lot of goodwill and arm-twisting to get Obamacare passed. It left little time or courage for attacking the always difficult question of taxes. The result of the mid-term elections was that many Democrats lost because they had supported Obamacare, as well as the President and House Speaker Pelosi's "Spend-America-into-Economic-Recovery" deficit spending spree.
The US Constitution does not allow those elected in mid-term elections to take their seats immediately. Instead, they are sworn in in the first week of January. That means that there is now in Washington what is called a lame-duck Congress, made up of the 2008-2010 Congress, including the then-majority Democrats who were defeated in November. It is they who are trying to deal with the new strength of the Republicans who won in November but who are not yet seated in Congress.
Given this scenario, it is little wonder that the GOP is calling the shots. They negotiated a deal with the President to provide for the extension of current tax rates so that already-suffering American taxpayers will not feel the pinch of having higher taxes deducted from their paychecks starting in January.
The difficulty is that this deal means that high-income taypayers are also given the advantage of the current lower tax rates, even though the President made a point of saying during his campaign for President that he would stop these wealthier Americans from having the advantage of "low" tax rates. The GOP argument, which they took to the voters in November, was that many of these "wealthy" taxpayers are really small businesses who need these lower tax rates in order to grow and hire more employees, the universal American goal right now. The electorate seemingly agrees with the GOP who won a majority in the House of Representatives where taxes must originate.
What Obama knows is that if he waits until the GOP controls the House, he will have less bargaining power and will have to give up even more of his leftist agenda. Therefore, he concluded, deal now.
The Democrats are angry because they wanted to fight it out. The President has repeated several times that he will not put economically struggling American taxpayers at risk by using them as pawns in this purely political fight that the Democrats will lose in January anyway.
The Democratic congressional leadership is threatening not to provide the majority vote needed to make the "deal" law. The President has said this is not how the American electorate expects its elected lawmakers to behave.
The Republicans are sitting back, enjoying the show.
What will happen? It is anybody's guess, but the sheer upside-down nature of the political struggle is hugely interesting.