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Politico's "Anatomy of a Shutdown" has a boatload of gossipy, behind-the-scene nuggets from the two-week government shutdown, but one in particular stands out as a fitting symbol of Washington's current political dysfunction.

According to the story published on Friday morning (as reported by the team John Bresnahan, Manu Raju, Jake Sherman, and Carrie Budoff Brown), the shutdown was really two contests in one. The first was between Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, two old Senate rivals who were tasked with bringing the deal together, despite barely being on speaking terms. The other was between House Speaker John Boehner and the members of his own party, who battled against the Speaker's plan that might have avoided an embarrassing political defeat. In the end, he finally brought them (some of them) around and struck a deal, but not without cost.

At one point, shortly after the shutdown began, Barack Obama pulled Boehner aside at a White House meeting and asked, “John, what happened?”

“I got overrun, that’s what happened,” Boehner said.

Standing in between both the House and Senate battles, was Ted Cruz, the freshman Senator from Texas who led the fight to defund Obamacare. Though he was acting almost entirely on his own in the Senate (with an assist from Utah's Mike Lee), he did have a lot of allies in the House of Representatives; the same group resisting Boehner's efforts to put an end to things.