Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell closed the deal to avert a fiscal crisis. But will his work with Democrats mean his re-election bid will take a hit? (The Washington Post) 
 
 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell closed the deal to avert a fiscal crisis. But will his work with Democrats mean his re-election bid will take a hit? (The Washington Post) 
 
 By Tuesday night, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) realized he had run out of luck. House Republicans had failed once again to pass critical legislation out of their chamber, so the Democrats who control the Senate had all the leverage. 
 
 McConnell was cornered, “caught in a cul-de-sac,” he said, with the “worst hand” he had ever been dealt. 
 
 All of Washington was scrambling to put the pieces of a deal in place to reopen the federal government, avert a federal debt default and deliver Republicans from the political disaster that had been haunting them for two weeks. 
 
 After the House failed, it was up to the Senate to broker a solution to the problem. So over the final 24 hours of the drama, McConnell, perhaps the most accomplished congressional dealmaker of his time, scrambled to pick up the pieces. 
 
 Thursday, he settled on an extended football metaphor to describe his predicament: He was a backup quarterback thrust into the game after the starter got knocked out with a concussion, and he was backed up against his own end zone with little protection. 
 
 Post reporter David Fahrenthold joins host Reid Wilson to discuss the unexpected things inserted in lawmakers’ resolution to reopen the government. (The Washington Post) 
 
 “I felt like I was on the two-yard line, I had a pretty weak offensive line, and the best I could hope for was to try to punt,” McConnell said. 
 
 For the fourth time in less than three years, McConnell has emerged as the key Republican in deals with Democrats over fiscal matters. He’s now negotiated two tax deals and two debt-limit measures that averted potential financial meltdowns. 
 
 The latest effort defied the skeptics who asserted that McConnell’s political problems at home in Kentucky during a reelection campaign would sideline him. From his right, he faces a GOP primary challenger who accuses him of selling out conservative principles in his bipartisan deals; on his left is a fresh-faced Democratic challenger who depicts McConnell as part of the “disease of dysfunction” in Washington. 
 
 McConnell’s muted involvement in the early rounds of the government shutdown fight lent some credence to the theories. 
 
 But McConnell swears he is not running from his role as the indispensable Washington Republican and, in fact, plans to make it the hallmark of both his primary and general election campaign next year. “When the country’s in crisis and when a bipartisan agreement is needed, I’ve demonstrated on no fewer than four occasions that I can step into the breach and get an outcome that’s good for the country,” he said. 
 
 It will be a a tricky line to walk. In his primary fight against a first-time candidate, Matt Bevin, McConnell says he is going to trumpet some of those deals. 
 
 In 2011, the GOP leader and Vice President Biden finalized a pact that lifted the debt ceiling but was also accompanied by a complex set of more than $2 trillion in spending cuts. Then last New Year’s Eve, McConnell and Biden signed a deal that permanently extended the Bush-era tax cuts for more than 98 percent of workers and granted a permanent estate tax exemption up to $5 million. 
 
 “With the $5 million estate tax exemption, virtually every family farm and small business in my state can be gotten down to the next generation,” he said. 
 
 The spending cuts in the 2011 Budget Control Act — also know as the sequester cuts — represent real reductions in government funding that McConnell mentions every chance he gets. 
 
 When it came to the negotiations for reopening the government and avoiding default, McConnell’s main goal was to protect his winnings from the two previous deals. 
 
 With the government funding stream set to expire Sept. 30, all the senior GOP leaders on Capitol Hill, including House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), wanted to avoid the strategy of shutting down the federal government in an effort to thwart President Obama’s health-care law. 
 
 But outside conservative advocacy groups such as Heritage Action had spent the August break scaring Republicans, particularly younger members in the House, into pushing the shutdown strategy. Despite reports that only 20 or 30 House Republicans were willing to shut down the government, the number was far higher — 80 or more — and Boehner’s leadership team got steamrolled in trying to avoid the shutdown. 
 
 Even as Senate Republicans privately castigated Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) for meeting with the House renegades and pushing the strategy, they couldn’t steer the effort away from shutdown. 
 
 “It certainly wasn’t anybody’s intention to have the shutdown, and hopefully we’ve all learned some important lessons,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), McConnell’s second in command, said. 
 
 Still, the ball remained in Boehner’s hands for the first 10 days of the shutdown. Finally, the GOP’s poll numbers cratered just as the deadline for the debt ceiling grew within a week, and the potential for default took over. McConnell began meeting with Republicans such as Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, whom he sent out to discuss options with moderate Democrats. 
 
 As bad as his hand was, McConnell thought he could secure a couple of conservative concessions in a deal, such as the repeal of an unpopular tax on medical devices that helps fund the Affordable Care Act. 
 
 Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who led the talks this time and who reveled in having the leverage over his rival, outfoxed McConnell. When the bipartisan group appeared to be gaining momentum, he shut it down and forced the talks into just a negotiation between the two Senate leaders. 
 
 When McConnell issued a statement Sunday announcing support for the “bipartisan” Collins plan, Reid summoned the Democrats working on the plan into his office. While still sitting in Reid’s office, a statement under their name was issued saying the Democrats had pulled back. 
 
 “Democrats who said they would support certain things disappeared. It would best be described as a pretty weak hand,” McConnell said. 
 
 The final deal pretty much gave Reid everything he wanted but set up new fights, in January over government funding and later next year over the next debt-ceiling increase. 
 
 “When you’re on the two-yard line and your offensive line is shaky, you’re trying to get a better position on the field,” McConnell said. ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| House Speaker John Boehner just wanted to sneak out of the White House for a smoke. 
 
 But President Barack Obama pulled him aside for a grilling. Obama wanted to know why they were in the second day of a government shutdown that the speaker had repeatedly and publicly pledged to avoid. 
 
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 reset What Obama said, why it matters POLITICO analysis: Assessing shutdown damage Shutdown: Flashback to 1995 
 
 “John, what happened?” Obama asked, according to people briefed on the Oct. 2 conversation. 
 
 “I got overrun, that’s what happened,” Boehner said. 
 
 (WATCH: Who won the shutdown? Top 5 quotes) 
 
 It may be the most concise explanation of a chaotic, 16-day standoff that prompted the first government shutdown in nearly two decades and ended only hours before the world’s largest economy nearly exhausted its ability to pay the bills. The fiscal drama turned on a series of complicated relationships, internecine Republican warfare and rare Democratic unity. 
 
 The House Republican conference ran roughshod over Boehner, a 22-year veteran of Washington who started the fight demanding to strip funds for Obamacare but settled in the end for the reaffirmation of a minor provision already in the law. 
 
 (PHOTOS: The government reopens) 
 
 He was overtaken by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who swept in near the end to forge a bipartisan agreement, part of an attempt to shield Republicans from further damage and salvage his party’s chances of winning back the Senate next year. 
 
 A particular low point came Oct. 1 when Democrats released private emails to POLITICO aimed at making Boehner look like a hypocrite. The emails showed that Boehner had actually been deeply engaged in fixing an Obamacare glitch that would have cost lawmakers and their staff thousands of extra dollars. Hill veterans weren’t quite as shocked by the flip-flop as the utter breakdown of decorum between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Boehner. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Obama’s latest push features a familiar strategy) 
 
 Above all, Republicans never believed Obama would hold firm on his refusal to negotiate and Democrats would maintain an unusual level of cohesion — united by a visceral desire to put the tea party in its place and an almost mama grizzly instinct to protect Obamacare. 
 
 “It was not a smart play,” McConnell said Thursday of the GOP’s Obamacare strategy. “It had no chance of success.” 
 
 Obama and Reid stuck together, emerging as the political victors. Their hard-ball tactics were designed to “break the fever” brought on by the tea party, but it also helped drive the country to the edge of default. 
 
 Republicans cycled through every option possible during the three-week standoff to save face. Their Obamacare demands devolved from repeal and defund to a delay of the individual mandate. They revived the idea of a “grand bargain” on taxes and government spending but Reid openly laughed when Boehner raised it during a White House meeting. They offered a more narrow proposal to replace the sequester cuts for two years. Then, they went back to Obamacare. 
 
 (PHOTOS: Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid’s friendship) 
 
 Nothing worked. 
 
 When things were at their worst, some Republican senators urged Vice President Joe Biden to get more involved. But he told each of them it wasn’t his call. Biden participated in meetings at the White House but Reid, still angry about the vice president’s concessions during the fiscal cliff talks last December, had shut him out of direct negotiations with lawmakers this time around. 
 
 By Wednesday, Republicans just needed a way out, agreeing to a bill that looked almost identical to what they rejected three weeks earlier: a debt-limit increase until Feb. 7, an extension of federal funding through Jan. 15 and no binding strings attached. 
 
 (Also on POLTICO: Shutdown aftermath: John Harris, Todd Purdum assess damage) 
 
 This account of the behind-the-scenes drama was drawn from dozens of interviews with key players in Congress and at the White House. The look back reveals how Republicans waged a fight on Obamacare that their leaders knew they would probably lose but pushed anyways because many in their ranks truly believed that Democrats, like they’ve done so often before, would fold — especially under the threat of an historic default on U.S. debt. 
 
 McConnell told his colleagues this week that his party should “never” be put in the same political position again. 
 
 “We fought the good fight,” Boehner told WLW radio on Wednesday. “We just didn’t win.” 
 
 (PHOTOS: John Boehner’s life and career) 
 
 The buildup to shutdown 
 
 Any hope of an easy debt limit extension was dashed in late August when Boehner promised a “whale of a fight.” 
 
 Obama and Reid got on the same page early on, agreeing during strategy sessions over the summer that they wouldn’t give up anything until Republicans renewed the debt limit and government funding. 
 
 Democrats never believed that Boehner could deliver the 217 House votes he needed to cut a deal. He could shut down the government and risk default, but because of hard-line conservatives, Boehner couldn’t pass anything. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Obama and Reid this privately, and she repeated it publicly. This belief drove the Democrats throughout the crisis: stand firm and Boehner will be forced to fold. 
 
 (WATCH: Nancy Pelosi blasts GOP for budget saga) 
 
 But they had to keep each other in check. 
 
 Reid nixed an idea in mid-September to invite the congressional leaders over to the White House for a talk. It sends the wrong message, Reid argued to Obama in a call. We shouldn’t even create the appearance of a negotiation, Reid said. 
 
 The meeting never happened. 
 
 In the House, Boehner and his leadership team ran through a spate of options — none of which his conference would accept. First, the Ohio Republican proposed keeping the debt limit and government-funding discussions separate, which Democrats were privately hoping would happen. He suggested passing a budget bill that completely funded the Affordable Care Act. A resolution would be passed alongside that defunded the law, but it could’ve been stripped out by the Senate and sent to Obama’s desk. 
 
 The proposal was dubbed the “Cantor plan,” after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who came up with the idea. Then, Boehner would’ve had Republicans fight hard on the debt ceiling, using the sequester as a bargaining chip against Obama. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Mitch McConnell defends deal, slams Obamacare tactics) 
 
 But that’s where Boehner miscalculated: he assumed House Republicans only wanted a show vote. Instead, they wanted so much more, determined to nullify the health care law and use a government shutdown and threat of a debt-limit default to get there. 
 
 Boehner’s rank-and-file were being egged on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a populist freshman who was quickly gaining followers in the House as quickly as he was alienating his fellow Republicans senators. 
 
 In the run-up to the shutdown, Obama was weak politically; his Syria strategy was panned by both parties; Obamacare was suffering poor poll numbers; and Republicans thought they had him on the ropes. 
 
 (WATCH: Timeline of Ted Cruz’s Obamacare crusade) 
 
 Yet Cruz’s anti-Obamacare drive played right into Democratic hands. 
 
 “The president gets up every day and reads the newspaper and thanks God that Ted Cruz is in the United States Senate,” a Republican senator pointedly told Cruz at a closed-door meeting. 
 
 Even amiable and soft-spoken Republicans like John Boozman of Arkansas tore apart Cruz in a private GOP meeting, saying he was making GOP senators seem like they were for Obamacare when they had fought so hard to torpedo it. Boozman pointedly told Cruz he hadn’t been bullied since middle school, and he wouldn’t be bullied now. 
 
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– During a White House meeting on Oct. 2, a day into the shutdown, John Boehner slipped out for a smoke. Barack Obama followed him, demanding a private explanation for the shutdown. "John, what happened?" he asked. "I got overrun, that's what happened," Boehner replied. That anecdote kicks off Politico's behind-the-scenes look at the crisis. The Wall Street Journal has one too—with different bits of insider gossip. Here are the most interesting tidbits from both: Obama and Harry Reid decided on their no-negotiation strategy over the summer, believing that Boehner could never unite his fractured caucus behind anything. Republicans never believed the pair would stick to it. Boehner and Reid initially struck a deal in which Boehner would pass a sequester-level budget with an ObamaCare-defunding rider that the Senate could simply strip out. Boehner assumed—incorrectly—that his caucus only wanted a show vote. Boehner's former chief of staff was feeding the White House intelligence, telling it that Boehner would have to fight up until the debt ceiling deadline. Reid also took to monitoring Twitter for hints on the GOP's next move—a sign of how badly communication was flowing. Many Republicans turned to Joe Biden, hoping he would intervene. Biden told them he'd been "sidelined … at the direction of the president," one rep says. Reid, bitter about the fiscal cliff deal Biden negotiated, had wanted him out. At one point, Boehner brought up the idea of a "grand bargain" at a White House meeting; Reid laughed in his face. When Paul Ryan joined the fray at an Oct. 10 meeting, he told Obama that he would "miss his moment" and derail his whole term if he didn't strike a deal. But he also made what White House aides called a "Freudian slip," saying, "We’re going to have six weeks to negotiate the debt limit." That night, aides to Boehner, Cantor, and Obama began talking about a broader budget deal, and agreed to talk more in the morning. The White House never called. When Mitch McConnell finally decided he had to broker the deal, he partnered with Lamar Alexander—angering Susan Collins, who had worked far harder on the process, only to see her own deal torpedoed. McConnell picked Alexander because he had better conservative credentials, and was pals with Reid confidante Chuck Schumer. Alexander and Schumer brokered the deal behind the scenes, then passed it off to Reid and McConnell. McConnell tells the Washington Post that he saw himself as a backup quarterback thrown into the game. "I felt like I was on the two-yard line, I had a pretty weak offensive line, and the best I could hope for was to try to punt." Boehner made one last-ditch attempt to pass an alternative. "We're running out of time," he told his caucus. "Your 'no' vote has consequences." But as Reid and Obama had predicted, he couldn't convince them. With the ball back in McConnell and Reid's court, McConnell made a few last-minute demands. Reid rejected them. It took all of 15 minutes for McConnell to call back and accept Reid's terms.