The Hill News

The White House defended on Wednesday its tax cut deal as the best possible outcome of its negotiations with Republicans.

The administration sought to quell sustained anger from liberals, who complain that the Obama White House caved too quickly and too substantially to Republicans' demand that high-end tax cuts be extended.

Democrats on Capitol Hill have lashed out at the administration and said it should have been more willing to fight on, a maneuver, White House senior adviser argued Wednesday, that would have resulted in an even worse outcome.

"If you ask them where this ends if we don't compromise now, basically they say we can have this protracted struggle and show Republicans favor the wealthy over the middle class," Axelrod said on CNN. "But nobody can tell you it would end better than this compromise."

The administration is pushing back against the outrage expressed by liberals, who say that the White House should have! led a showdown with Republicans on tax cuts.

The White House should have forced the Senate to stay in session until the new year to force the GOP to relent and allow an extension of unemployment benefits -- a bargaining chip used by the administration in the tax cut negotiations, said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

"If the vice president walked in today and said that instead of doing what he did say to defend this package, that is really the opposite of what a lot of us campaigned on," Brown said Tuesday night on MSNBC, referring to Vice President Biden's trip to Capitol Hill to sell the plan to Democrats. "It would be a very different place."

But Axelrod dismissed such a move as theatrics that would only endanger Democrats' bargaining position on tax cuts as it wore on.

"We're looking at a long political Kabuki dance that would have ended up with a compromise not nearly as good as this," he said on CBS's "Early Show."
Democrats looking to reshape the deal might also be disappo! inted; A xelrod said the administration views the compromise it struck with Republicans are largely a finished product.

"I think the framework of the deal is in place," he said on ABC's "Good Morning America."