For a couple of weeks, I’ve been hearing that White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley called Speaker John Boehner and offered to give the GOPers the cuts they wanted on the 2011 budget. Sam Stein heard something similar:

A party operative, plugged into the discussions, made it clear that there were disagreements over the chief of staff’s negotiating tactics. “He is choosing to appease Republicans over fighting for Democratic principles,” the operative said, pointing to a post put together by the Obama-allied Center for American Progress, arguing that $32 billion in cuts is “not much of a compromise if we end up with what the House Republican leadership wanted in the first place.”

I wish this was wrong. But, it’s not.

Today, I listened to Obama’s remarks during the press briefing. He basically confirmed it:

In fact, what we’ve been able to do is to present to the House Republicans a budget framework that would cut the same amount of spending as Speaker Boehner and Chairman Rogers originally proposed — their original proposal for how much would be cut. And several weeks ago, there were discussions between the White House and Speaker Boehner’s office in which we said, let’s start negotiating off of that number, $73 billion.

So, the White House strategy of negotiating with Republicans really is to give them what they want. In case we missed the point, Obama repeated it:

And I just want to set the context for this now. Again, I’m going to repeat. Speaker Boehner, Chairman Rogers, the Republican appropriations chairman — their original budget proposed $73 billion in cuts. We have now agreed to $73 billion worth of cuts.

Got that?

What law school did Obama attend? Was he absent when they studied negotiations? That has to be the worst negotiating tactic around.

No wonder the Hill GOPers have no fear of the White House. When you start negotiating by agreeing to the Republicans’ opening offer, you aren’t negotiating, you’re caving.

And once you cave and accept their opening offer, as we found out today, it’s still not enough.

President Barack Obama warned Tuesday that he would not sign another stopgap spending bill without an agreement first on the 2011 budget, even as Republicans upped the ante, signaling that a $40 billion package of cuts might have the makings of a deal to avert a shutdown Friday.

The Republicans just keep moving the goal posts — and, the President is letting them get away with it.