Are the president and his political advisers lamenting the supercommittee’s failure? No. For them, failure was a perfectly fine option that reinforced their do-nothing Congress message. But this is different from asserting that the responsibility for failure rests with the president.

Listening to his threat Monday night to veto any effort to defuse the trigger mechanism, I wondered whether weighing in so forcefully a week earlier might have helped concentrate the congressional mind.

Perhaps, but what’s clear is that committee Democrats moved awfully far in the name of compromise. They offered more in Medicare cuts than Simpson-Bowles did — or than Obama did with Boehner, for that matter — and accepted less in the way of tax increases than those two proposals.

For their part, Republicans moved off their position of complete intransigence on taxes. Then they refused to budge. No wonder they’ve moved to the convenient default: blame Obama.