How should Obama approach the next installment of our ongoing fiscal groundhog day?

The administration itself appears to be confused on this question. While the White House insists it won’t negotiate over raising the debt ceiling, negotiation appears to be precisely what it’s up to. Politico reports that White House officials are meeting with Republican senators on Thursday to explore a deal that would simultaneously fund the government past the September 30th end of the fiscal year, replace the sequester with a more sane combination of spending cuts and revenue, and raise the debt ceiling before it crushes us in mid-to-late October.

This, to employ a clinical term, is nuts. Whether or not the White House maintains its no-debt-ceiling negotiation stance within these talks, the whole construct throws the GOP a lifeline where none would otherwise exist. After all, the Republican leadership knows it would be suicidal to force a debt-default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. It also knows that forcing a government shutdown by failing to fund the government past September 30th would be politically disastrous. (John Boehner has said he believes it could cost Republicans their House majority.) But, of course, rank-and-file Republicans in Congress are demanding that their leadership hold the line on at least one, and preferably both, of those issues. The right-wingers want their leadership to balk at keeping the government open unless they can first defund Obamacare, and to resist raising the debt ceiling unless they extract massive additional spending cuts, particularly from entitlement programs.

Boehner’s only hope of navigating the vanishingly small space between his House lunatics and, well, reality is to combine both issues and the sequester into one massive negotiation. In that scenario, Boehner would agree to replace the sequester and to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for cuts to entitlement spending. The logic, as Politico explains it, is that Obama could claim he only negotiated over the sequester, not the debt ceiling (his ostensible red line). For his part, Boehner would be able to claim he won spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, allowing him to save face before his caucus. Meanwhile, the deal for replacing the sequester would fund the government during the next fiscal year, defusing the shutdown threat as well.

Long story short: The White House willingness to engage in a multi-issue mega-negotiation plays entirely into Boehner’s hand. It’s basically a strategy designed to maximize Republican leverage and minimize Obama’s. At the very least, the White House should want to keep each track of the negotiation unambiguously separate, forcing Boehner to acknowledge his terrible bargaining position.