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CBS News’ Brian Montopoli writes this morning:

Boehner and the rest of the House Republican leadership laid out their offer in a letter to the president earlier this week. It said Republicans would cut a total of $1.2 trillion in spending, but it does not actually say what would be cut. The letter broadly says that the cuts would follow those put forth in what was called “the Bowles plan,” a reference to Democrat Erskine Bowles, who quickly put out a statement saying that the letter does not represent his beliefs. (Republicans were referencing testimony that Bowles gave to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction last year. That testimony represented Bowles’ understanding of the midpoint between the two sides at the time; he noted Monday that “circumstances have changed since then.”)

Let’s give House Republicans the benefit of the doubt and assume they are calling for the cuts articulated last year by Bowles. His testimony called for roughly $600 billion in Medicare savings, in part from raising the Medicare eligibility age, $300 billion in other discretionary spending cuts, and $300 billion in cuts to other mandatory spending programs.

Despite GOP claims that they represent a middle ground, there is simply no reason Democrats would agree to these cuts. Here’s why: If the nation goes off the fiscal cliff, it faces $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts split between domestic spending and military spending. Republicans are effectively proposing to keep the cuts but focus them entirely areas that Democrats want to protect: Domestic spending and other entitlements. Meanwhile, under the GOP plan, there would be no cuts to defense programs — the area Republicans want to protect. Why on earth would Democrats agree to a deal in which all the cuts are made to their priorities when they could simply do nothing and let the pain be shared by both sides?

Now to be fair, Montopoli doesn’t completely single out Republicans for blame in the present impasse over a budget deal to prevent sweeping automatic budget cuts and tax hikes set to take effect at the end of the year. According to this analysis, President Barack Obama’s aggressive stand in favor of resetting the present 35% top federal income tax rate to the Clinton-era 39.5%–again, only on income over $250,000–is “far from what Republicans could swallow.”

But it’s at least a specific proposal; more than John Boehner can deliver.

When it comes to new revenue – aka, additional money coming into the government – Boehner has set a target of $800 billion. This is not insignificant: The offer has already prompted howls from some on the right who oppose any new revenue. But it is also less than substantive, since Boehner declines to say how he would make the cuts — he merely says they should come through “pro-growth tax reform that closes special-interest loopholes and deductions while lowering rates.” Does that mean getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction? Capping charitable deductions? The letter doesn’t say. [Pols emphasis]

With polling decisively indicating once again that intransigent Republicans will take the blame in the event of a failure to reach an agreement, what we have here is the equivalent of Paul Ryan’s infamous “budget with no numbers”–a proposal that really isn’t even a proposal, yet is nevertheless being insistently represented as a good-faith attempt at reaching an agreement.

Bottom line: both sides may be taking a hard line with a few weeks left to negotiate, but there’s a difference between doing so with specifics, and wasting everyone’s time. The polls say the public gets the difference, just as polls show that voters favor Obama’s proposal for raising taxes on high income earners while minimizing cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

With all this in mind, back to Boehner’s call to “get serious.”

A lot has been written today about the Tea Party and the problems it continues to cause the wing of the Republican Party that may actually be interested in governing. First, from “The Fix“:

Almost four years removed from its initial stirrings, the tea party movement finds itself riven by internal discord, without some of its most prominent leaders and faced with a party establishment that seems ready to abandon it – or at least buck its wishes – in the face of the 2012 election results.

“The Tea party has the opportunity to remain a leading force in American politics, but to do so, it must mature, take the next step and prove it can be part of a coalition that can actually govern,” said Jesse Benton, a longtime adviser to retiring Rep. Ron Paul and now campaign  manager for Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell’s 2014 re-election race. “After two cycles, it’s not enough to just be the angry people waving Gadsden Flags and yelling about Washington.”…

…One senior Republican party strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the future of the tea party movement, expressed concern that while the tea party was at a “low point” today, the coming legislative fights in Congress could lead to a renaissance in the movement.

“What I worry about is that the fiscal cliff/debt ceiling negotiations become like TARP, which is what started this,” said the GOP strategist. “We get a deal that is good for the country but our base goes crazy and it gets them all ginned up again.”

As we’ve written before in this space, moderate Republican leaders understand all too well that the Tea Party is crippling their chances of winning back control from Democrats on both the national and state level. Republican leaders are doing what they can to weaken the influence of Tea Party-backed elected officials, but we don’t see a happy ending here. As the Associated Press reports:

House Speaker John Boehner’s decision to take plum committee assignments away from four conservative Republican lawmakers after they bucked party leaders on key votes isn’t going over well with advocacy groups that viewed them as role models.

Reps. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas and Justin Amash of Michigan will lose their seats on the House Budget Committee chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan next year. And Reps. Walter Jones of North Carolina and David Schweikert of Arizona are losing their seats on the House Financial Services Committee.

The move is underscoring a divide in the Republican Party between tea party-supported conservatives and the House GOP leadership.

“This is a clear attempt on the part of Republican leadership to punish those in Washington who vote the way they promised their constituents they would – on principle – instead of mindlessly rubber-stamping trillion dollar deficits and the bankrupting of America,” said Matt Kibbe, president of the tea party group FreedomWorks.

When you add this news to the fracturing of Speaker Boehner’s caucus and the seemingly rudderless GOP Senate leadership, you’ve got a nice recipe for a crap casserole. We’ve said it before: The Tea Party is absolutely killing the Republican Party. They had a nice honeymoon in the 2010 midterm elections, but it’s been all downhill ever since.

And the GOP has no idea how to stop it.

Our friend Craig Hughes of RBI Strategies Tweeted not long after the election:

Well, as The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber reports today, Hughes was more right than anybody knew–that is, about what Republicans, around the country but particularly here in Colorado, believed would be the outcome going into an election they were about to lose.

It’s no secret that the Romney campaign believed it was headed for victory on Election Day. A handful of outlets have reported that Team Romney’s internal polling showed North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia moving safely into his column and that it put him ahead in a few other swing states. When combined with Ohio, where the internal polling had him close, Romney was on track to secure all the electoral votes he needed to win the White House. The confidence in these numbers was such that Romney even passed on writing a concession speech, at least before the crotchety assignment-desk known as “reality” finally weighed in.

Less well-known, however, are the details of the polls that led Romney to believe he was so close to the presidency. Which other swing states did Romney believe he was leading in, and by how much? What did they tell him about where to spend his final hours of campaigning? Why was his team so sanguine about its own polling, even though it often parted company with the publicly available data? In an exclusive to The New Republic, a Romney aide has provided the campaign’s final internal polling numbers for six key states…

The numbers include internal polls conducted on Saturday, November 3, and Sunday, November 4, for Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado, and New Hampshire. According to Newhouse, the campaign polled daily, then combined the results into two-day averages.

In the polling data provided to TNR by Mitt Romney’s chief internal pollster Neil Newhouse, Romney has a 2.5 point lead on President Barack Obama in Colorado over the weekend before Election Day. As you know, the President won Colorado by almost 5.5 points. The range of explanations offered by Newhouse in this story vary from Latino voters (which while significant, don’t fully cover the spread), over-reliance on self-identified “highly likely voters,” and the perils of polling on a Sunday. Each one of these, the story goes, unintentionally helped contribute to the false sense of optimism projected by the GOP going into Election Day.

This story again answers the question of whether the Romney campaign was convinced it was going to win, or whether there was a more complicated process of spin for the base that the higher levels of the campaign knew wasn’t true. Right to the very top, this was a campaign that did believe victory was imminent, and was genuinely surprised when it failed to materialize.

What this story doesn’t seem to adequately capture, beyond the raw numbers of how wrong they were, is the depth of the bubble–with the exception of Gallup and a few clearly GOP-skewed pollsters, Obama’s win in Colorado was accurately forecast in several pre-election polls.

It’s also worth noting, as Hughes did, that longtime local GOP operative Rich Beeson was Romney’s political director. Beeson’s willing participation in the groupthink and flawed assumptions that led the Romney campaign to believe Colorado was in their column shows the extent of the break with a reality they should have seen coming at them like a Mack truck.

Answer: a perhaps unprecedented extent.

A press release this morning from the Colorado AFL-CIO:

Colorado labor leaders are in Washington D.C. today to discuss the severe impacts to Colorado of a Congressional deal from the lame duck Congress. According to a new report released by the AFL-CIO, 693,000 Coloradans could be negatively impacted if Congress attempts cuts to Social Security, including 94,000 people with disabilities and 47,000 children. Of the 619,000 who get their health care coverage from Medicaid, 374,000 children and 49,000 seniors could be affected if the lame duck Congress makes cuts to Medicaid benefits. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid combined deliver $17.8 billion per year into Colorado’s economy.

“We are in Washington today to let our Congressional delegation know the importance of protecting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and other vital services that support our working families,” said Mike Cerbo, executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO. “Retirees, people with disabilities and children shouldn’t have to suffer because some in Congress want to give more tax breaks to the very richest. We need to create an economy that works for everyone and rebuild the middle class-and that doesn’t start with balancing the budget on their backs.”

As the so-called “fiscal cliff” approaches, members of Congress have suggested cuts to benefits for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid even while calling for renewing tax cuts for the richest 2%. If those tax cuts are renewed, the richest 2% in Colorado would receive an average of $31,650 in tax cuts, while the rest of Coloradans would receive an average of $1,340. The 2012 House Republican budget plan would cut federal support to Colorado’s Medicaid program by at least $7.1 billion (22 percent) over 10 years.

Read AFL’s one-pager of facts on Colorado and the fiscal debate in Washington here.

An insightful story in Sunday’s Durango Herald by reporter Emery Cowan:

La Plata County voters favored the president by a margin of 57 percent to 41 percent four years ago. This year, 53 percent of voters supported Obama and 44 percent of voters supported Mitt Romney…

Only one La Plata County precinct supported Obama in 2008 but favored Romney in 2012. Precinct 29 in the northern Animas Valley supported Obama 54 percent to 45 percent in 2008. In 2012, 47 percent of voters supported Obama and 51 percent supported Romney. No precinct that favored John McCain in 2008 went for Obama in 2012.

The county’s Democratic tilt in every other race, from county commissioner to state representative, reverses a rightward drift in 2010 and more closely mirrors how the county voted in 2008.

The county favored Democratic candidate Mike McLachlan for the state House of Representatives by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. McLachlan, of Durango, unseated incumbent Rep. J. Paul Brown, of Ignacio.

Sal Pace, candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives who was beaten by incumbent Rep. Scott Tipton, won the county by a margin of 49 percent to 46 percent.

What you have in La Plata County are several factors that should favor Democratic election wins going forward. Arguably the biggest is the growing population and affluence of Durango, one of the state’s most educated cities. The county as a whole is likewise experiencing economic growth–both in liberal-favored industries like tourism, and energy development. But notwithstanding somewhat softer performance for Obama this year than in 2008, the trend toward electing Democrats in La Plata County shows little sign of slowing in the long term.

Among other things, that’s important because Rep. Scott Tipton’s CD-3 seat is, at least on paper, quite competitive. Tipton won more easily than expected this year, and that may make Democrats think twice about competing for his seat in 2014. That said, CD-3’s principal Democratic base is Pueblo, while Republicans more or less own Mesa County. Tipton’s ties to nearby Cortez are of course a strong point in La Plata County, and in a diverse district like this one, it’s important to not lose too badly in the places where you’re destined to lose. That can be as important, in fact, as running up the score in your base regions.

But even with that hole card in play, this is a battleground increasingly favorable to Democrats. Perhaps that will catch up with Tipton, or his successor, as it did J. Paul Brown.