When it came time to deal with the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts, President Obama again immediately abandoned the liberal -- and his own original -- position of allowing all of the Bush Tax Cuts to expire and started negotiating from the centrist position of allowing only the Bush Tax Cuts over $250,000 to expire. By holding hostage the extension of unemployment benefits, Republicans quickly got their way in the tax talks. Not only were all of the Bush Tax Cuts extended, the wealthy were given a substantial estate tax break as well. As Paul Krugman pointed out at the time, Obama indicated that he did not include a debt-ceiling increase as part of the deal because he takes "John Boehner at his word -- that nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse, that that would not be a good thing to happen."

Well, we know now how that played out.

The next hostage situation arrived when it was time to pass a budget or face a government shutdown. The impasse was broken when the president agreed to what he called "the biggest annual spending cut in history." At $38.5 billion, it was actually a larger cut than Republicans had originally asked for, leading comedian Bill Maher to joke, "You can always tell when Obama's negotiations with the Republicans are winding down, because he's missing his watch and his lunch money."

That brings us to the current debt-ceiling hostage situation in which Republicans, led by tea party extremists, decided to threaten not only a government shutdown but total economic shutdown. Déjà vu all over again: First the president offered a plan that included $4 trillion in deficit reduction, with cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security all on the table in exchange for a few hundred billion in revenue from closing corporate tax loopholes. This initial proposal was far to the right of what his own Bipartisan Fiscal Commission proposed. When this "grand bargain" was shot down and the president ruled out using the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to unilaterally increase the debt ceiling, there was nothing to do but surrender.

And what of the final deal? The president remarked that he would "continue to make a detailed case to these lawmakers about why I believe a balanced approach is necessary to finish the job."

He can make that case all he wants but it's not going to make a difference. Public opinion is already overwhelmingly in favor of a balanced approach. And public opinion does not matter when dealing with Republicans so long as they are not open to negotiating.

Six months from now we will still have an extreme Republican caucus driven by bomb-throwing tea partiers. We will still have Grover Norquist and his anti-tax zealotry. We will still have the Club for Growth and other right-wing and tea party groups demanding that Republicans maintain complete ideological purity or face a primary challenge. You can probably make a pretty good guess as to what the outcome of Round Two of the debt ceiling fight will be just by finding out what the Republicans want and then tacking to the right by about 10 or 20 percent.