Having spent some time inside the White House, I have some sense of how the world looks and feels from that unique vantage point. Its denizens always have a sense of operating under enormous pressure, subject to myriad constraints. When criticized, White House officials typically respond that they have done the best they could in the circumstances, and that if their critics had been in their shoes, they would have done the same thing.

The more outside observers focus on the immediate situation, the more they will tend to agree with the assessment of the White House. But if we step back and take a longer view, we often see roads not taken that could have led to better outcomes. That’s certainly the case with the just completed debt ceiling negotiations.

As many critics have pointed out, this man-made crisis was entirely avoidable. The Democrats could have raised the ceiling last December. They chose not to, handing a sword to their adversaries. Senate majority leader Harry Reid wanted to force the incoming Republicans to accept some responsibility for the increase. We’ve seen how that worked out. And if President Obama genuinely believed that the Republicans would cooperate because it was the right and responsible thing to do, then naïveté was the least of his mistakes. (A moment of introspection about his own 2006 vote against increasing the debt ceiling should have sufficed to disabuse him of that notion.)

But there are two other less-discussed forks in the road, the first of which occurred just two weeks ago. If news accounts are accurate, the Obama/Boehner talks broke down when the president proposed increasing the revenue component of the grand bargain from $800 billion to $1.2 trillion. Given what he ultimately accepted, $800 billion looks pretty good. (How likely is it that the new congressional committee will be able to agree on anything approaching that figure?) To be sure, we’d have to know more than we do about the other components of the proposed deal, especially the changes in entitlement programs, to reach a solid all-things-considered judgment. And it’s not at all clear that Boehner’s fellow Republicans in the House would have gone along with him on such a bargain, either. But it has been widely reported that the White House shifted its stance only after the Gang of Six made its framework public. If the bipartisan G6 was proposing $1.2 trillion in revenue increases, how could the White House accept less? At the time, that must have seemed like a slam-dunk argument. But it was too clever by half, and the White House ended up throwing away a chance to promote the president’s “balanced” approach to deficit reduction … and, by the way, to drive a wedge into the massed ranks of the opposition.

The most important road not taken, however, occurred many months ago, in December of last year, when the president chose to keep his distance from the recommendations of his own fiscal commission. Suppose he had endorsed its broad approach while making it clear that he disagreed about a number of specifics. Suppose further that he had reinforced that message by featuring it in his 2011 State of the Union address and by using it as the framework for his 2012 budget proposal. If he had done so, he would have had a full six months to build support for his “everything on the table” approach and to rally the American people who, as countless surveys have shown, strongly prefer it to the Republicans’ spending cuts-only strategy.