He’s looking to the Obama White House to help start the reset: “I would ask them to start saying, ‘I understand that the people on the other side of the table have the best interests of the American people at heart.’ Simply recognize that. Everybody wants to do what’s best for the American public. Those sorts of statements repeated on a regular basis, it’s the start of dialogue. It’s not concession; it’s the beginning of dialogue.”…

But how to do you deal with the hyper-partisan congressional bomb-throwers? “Well it’s like a game of tic-tac-toe with the tantrum throwers,” Voss says. “In tic-tac-toe, if you’re going second, the best you can possibly do is tie—if you play the game. There’s a first-mover advantage. The minute you stop playing that game the first mover advantage goes away. So you don’t play their game at all. That’s the way you respond.”…

But Voss doesn’t believe President Obama is blameless in the current situation. “I see him using a lot of emotional terms as well and that’s never a good sign. The essence of what he’s saying is finger pointing. When you refuse to talk, then you have blinders on…and it happens to be typical thinking of someone who either doesn’t talk at all or completely gives in.” That’s is a decent distillation of Beltway conventional wisdom criticism of President Obama’s negotiating style to date.