Shaping the future with today’s choices.

Congratulations to the Obama White House on an extraordinary lame-duck session. This was made possible by the tax deal President Obama put together.

The Democratic party Left, of course, has spent much time continuing to hyperventilate about this deal. The "base" is unhappy and will run a primary opponent. James Galbraith thinks the Administration is "beyond inept, unprepared, weak, and ineffective." And this was before the tax deal. Katrina Vanden Heuvel calls the tax for everyone "political self-immolation."

I call it governing in a democracy -- but then I'm a centrist. By an intelligent compromise -- which Progressives hate but then much like the crazy Right they think any compromise is evil -- the President accomplished the following. First, on the tax deal itself he achieved a payroll tax reduction, the extension of long term unemployment (some progressive ought to ask someone receiving that how he or she likes the deal), and the extension of the earned income tax credit. Second, he won the time and some leverage to gain the Start treaty, and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Third, he temporarily blunted the momentum Republicans gained in the November elections. All of this, by the way, for a tax rate deal when everyone knows the tax structure has to be changed completely anyway.

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I guess there are those who would argue that the President and the nation would be better off by hanging tough, insisting on his $250,000 ceiling and vetoing anything else. But they live in a completely different cause and effect universe than the rest of us. By far the best cause-and-effect summation was provided by Charles Krauthammer (that's the Krauthammer who cannot stand President Obama) in his Washington Post column of Dec. 24: "Obama came back with a vengeance. His string of lame-duck successes is a singular political achievement. Because of it, the epic battles of the 112th Congress begin on what would have seemed impossible just one month ago - a level playing field."

And just as a forecast, I think the President is going to decide he prefers winning to losing and will look around asking, "what is the next losing battle I want not to fight." He faces the death of a thousand cuts on Health Care, and I suspect he will begin to ask if there is a winning redo there. There is.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team.