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Top 4 in Congress not so fab on debt deal _ yet

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WASHINGTON (AP) — For all the debt deal dynamics in Washington, a

final agreement really comes down to a gang of four.

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It’s this quartet – Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Minority

Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in the House; Majority Leader Harry

Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in the

Senate – who will have to draw on their experience, skill and charm

to find the deal and the votes to pass it for averting an

unprecedented government default next week. It also has to be a

deal that can get President Barack Obama’s signature.

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Deadline pressure is testing those abilities, and their tempers.

McConnell complained that Reid had dropped a deal the pair had

labored over after Obama balked.

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Reid denied that. “I would say to my friend Mitch McConnell: Nice

try, but don’t blame this on the president.”

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In the collegial Senate, those are relatively terse words. But the

stakes couldn’t be higher, or the consequences darker for the

fragile economy.

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By all accounts, there is a measure of trust among the four

congressional veterans. They’ve worked together before, in the 2008

financial crisis, for example.

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A look at the four leaders.

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The debt debate carries great weight in Boehner’s young

speakership, a test of how much trust and clout he commands in a

Republican caucus in which a sizable group equates any compromise

with failure. It’s also the moment where Boehner stands to define

himself on the global stage, the man second in line to the

presidency who either can or cannot handle big disputes over

economics and policy.

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Boehner, 61, spent weeks exploring a compromise with a president 12

years his junior, sometimes in secret. But Boehner also walked away

from those talks twice, very publicly.

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To some degree, Boehner has positioned himself above the

intemperate tussling of others in his caucus, including the handful

of Republicans who think a government default on its financial

obligations would be no big deal. He’s dismissed any suggestion of

a fight for primacy between himself and his ambitious

second-in-command, Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

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“We’re in the foxhole” together, Boehner said earlier this month,

throwing his arm around Cantor after a tense exchange between Obama

and the Virginia Republican.

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Boehner’s affability figures in too. He works closely with

McConnell and is regarded with affection by lawmakers of both

parties. He may need the support of Democrats if the final deal is

to pass the House.

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At a recent event celebrating the speakership of Kentuckian Henry

Clay, the moderator predicted that Pelosi would release some of her

Democrats to vote for the final plan. She laughed, and the

conversation came down to the House math that will determine the

outcome – for the nation, and for Boehner.

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“The speaker has all of my sympathy,” Pelosi, a year ago speaker

herself, offered.

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“Yeah,” he replied. But “do I get any votes?”

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Some dethroned House speakers call it quits and depart for the

peace of retirement. But Pelosi, the first woman to hold the

speakership, chose instead to run for re-election as the House’s

top Democrat after leading her party to defeat in the 2010

elections.

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She sees the debt debate as central to winning back control of the

House in 2012 – and, perhaps, a measure of vindication.

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Does Boehner – or Obama, for that matter – get Democratic votes for

a deal, and how many? Depends, she says.

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“If we’re going to have to supply the votes, we’re going to have to

be at the table,” she told The Associated Press.

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Pelosi, 71, was cut out of the closed-door negotiations last spring

over a budget for the rest of this fiscal year, when the House

Republican majority was still young. On the pivotal evening when a

deal was struck to avoid the first government shutdown in 15 years,

she left town to deliver a speech in Boston. It was a stark

distance from power for the woman who had muscled through Obama’s

signature health care overhaul.

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She’s a player now only because Boehner can’t count on his

240-member caucus to deliver 217 votes to pass a deal. With little

progress earlier this month, Pelosi felt free to give her president

an ultimatum: House Democrats will not vote for any cuts to

Medicare or Social Security benefits, including raising the

eligibility age for the former and reducing annual cost of living

increases for the latter.

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Pelosi is the only one of the four leaders who has not issued her

own proposal for the debt limit debate, throwing her support behind

Reid’s latest plan to raise the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion and

to count winding down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as $1 trillion

of an envisioned $2.7 trillion in spending cuts. It leaves the

question of what to do about Social Security and Medicare benefits

to the future.

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Reid, also 71, worked with McConnell’s idea to put the onus for

raising the debt ceiling on Obama in three steps between now and

the 2012 election. When that failed because of opposition from

conservative Republicans as well as Democrats, he produced his own

plan Monday – the $2.7 trillion package that would carry the

president and members of both parties in Congress into

2013.

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It would do so without any new revenues, thus meeting GOP demands

for no new taxes, and avoid touching Medicare, Medicaid and Social

Security. The White House lent its support despite Obama’s earlier

insistence on tax increases.

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Billy Vassiliadis, a longtime Democratic operative and Nevada

lobbyist, said that on major issues, Reid has “an endgame in his

own head. … Something very clear to him at the beginning of the

issue.” But if someone comes up with a new idea, “he’s very

receptive.”

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“He’s not going to get there damaging core constituencies,”

Vassiliadis said.

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Reid has delivered for the Democratic president, steering the

president’s massive health care overhaul through the Senate

shoals.

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The former boxer held his majority together through summer months

of rancorous town halls and “death panels,” dead-of-winter night

votes and a period of sheer hopelessness for the White House and

the party when Massachusetts voters picked a Republican for a

Senate seat. After Democrats were shellacked at the polls last

November, Reid helped Obama secure a nuclear arms treaty, repeal of

the policy prohibiting gays from serving openly in the military and

a tax deal.

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Solving the seemingly intractable debt dispute has ramifications

for Reid’s slim Democratic majority in the Senate as well as

Obama’s bid for a second term.

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In 2012, Democrats will be defending 22 seats and hoping to capture

the independent seat in Connecticut. Republicans have only 10 seats

to defend. Like Boehner, Reid has ambitious lieutenants who have

eyes on his office space.

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The Senate Republican caucus is a disparate group of freshmen tea

partyers, staunch fiscal conservatives and a handful of moderates.

McConnell largely has kept his rank and file in line, most notably

on Obama’s health care bill, as a few moderates flirted with the

Democrats but then returned to the Republican fold.

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Former Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, said McConnell delivered an early

message to the GOP caucus at the start of Obama’s tenure, when the

president’s approval ratings were close to a sky high 70

percent.

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“He said: `Let’s not confront him frontally. The country won’t like

it,'” Bennett recalled.

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Obama insisted he wanted to close the U.S. naval facility at

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that is used to hold terror suspects.

Republicans and some congressional Democrats balked, fighting any

effort to move the detainees to U.S. soil, and prevailed over the

president.

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“There are issues we can win on and what he picked was Guantanamo.

The country as a whole did not want Guantanamo closed,” Bennett

recalled. McConnell “handed President Obama a loss. He picked his

spots along the way and little by little you saw the president’s

ratings go down and Republicans go up. That’s one of the ways he

kept us altogether.”

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McConnell, 69, is a veteran of the Appropriations Committee, where

deal-making is a common practice, but the debt crisis has tested

his skills.

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His recent debt proposal was reviled by House conservatives. The

“Pontius Pilate” plan, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., called it. “Wash

your hands and leave the table.”

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McConnell warned that if Republicans allowed the government to

default, they would co-own the sputtering economy with Obama. The

result, he said, would be a second term for Obama, the antithesis

of McConnell’s goal. “The single most important thing we want to

achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,”

McConnell told the National Journal last year.

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In 2012, the GOP has a clear shot at capturing the Senate, and

McConnell could end up as the man in charge.

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But McConnell has had an uneasy relationship with tea partyers. His

candidate in Kentucky’s GOP primary in 2010 was Secretary of State

Trey Grayson, not upstart Rand Paul, who eventually won the

nomination and the seat.

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At the height of the fierce health care debate, when Obama traveled

to the Capitol to meet with Senate Democrats during a rare weekend

session, Reid and McConnell arranged for the GOP to temporarily

preside over the Senate as a courtesy as Democrats gathered behind

closed doors with the president.

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Conservative bloggers excoriated McConnell and the GOP leadership

for failing to act during their brief moments of power.

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